DAVID SIDORSKY
Does the Left Still Have the Power to Speak?
R
(CHARD RORTY has long been recognized as one of America's
leading philosophers, distinguished, among his other contribu–
tions, for an original interpretation of Deweyan pragmatism
which seeks to demonstrate the compatibility of this quintessentially
American thinker with central aspects of the philosophy of Martin Hei–
degger, the arch representative of continental European existentialism.
Accordingly, the prospect of Rorty's development of his views on the
future of American culture and politics inevitably gives rise to a sense of
expectation.
In one sense, this expectation is not disappointed. For Rorty, in
Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
(Harvard University Press,
$18.95),
has raised an appropriate and fun–
damental question after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the deba–
cle of other major socialist experiments in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa,
and Latin America: does the Left still have the power to speak? This
question carries an even more significant charge because of the contin–
ued intellectual domination of leftist ideological views in American cul–
ture, a domination which coexists alongside an awareness that the
policies and historical projections of the Left have been confounded by
the realities of our times.
Rorty's answer to this question is affirmative. His argument is that
the Left has played a necessary and uniquely beneficent role in Ameri–
can history during the twentieth century by defending the weak against
the strong. From
1964
to the present, according to Rorty, the power of
the Left has been weakened because it has been splintered into plethora
of groups. Consequently, Rorty has faith that the restora tion of what he
terms the "reformist Left," as an inclusive coalition comprised of all the
Leftist bands of the spectrum that had emerged during this century, can
be the activist instrument for "achieving our country."
The framing of this affirmative answer, however, involves Rorty in an
ambivalent reflection on each of the main components that have made
up the historical Left., for in describing any particular leftist group,
Rorty combines a species of hagiography with a critique of practice.
Thus, he goes so far as to credit the "academic Left" with the elimina–
tion of the prevalence of what he terms "sadism"-that is, prejudice
