Not just a liberal – Social philosophy as antiauthoritarian and utopian social criticism: Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country today

Abstract

Rorty understands pragmatism in philosophy and social science, literature and art, to be intertwined with the political project of changing the world. Achieving Our Country, together with a lecture on the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, has become Rorty’s political testament. Rorty understands the leftist American project as the incomplete one of all those who fight for a classless society of boundless diversity (1). At the centre of Achieving Our Country is the tragic division between old and new, social and cultural Left (2). Rorty’s patriotism is progressive and cosmopolitan (3). The American project can only be realized if the Left breaks the hegemony of the political Right (4). For that, America must be understood as a utopia that makes itself the avant-garde of global political, economic, social and cultural change (5). This utopia can be realized only by a new kind of unity between leftist centres in the university and leftist organizational power in the rest of society. In this respect, America could become a model for the rest of the world again (6).