Date: Mon, 01 Jun 1998 08:17:31 -0400
From: Ted Goertzel <goertzel@crab.rutgers.edu>
To: "psn@csf.colorado.edu" <psn@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: Slate's Review of Rorty Book
Slate Magazine has an interesting online review of Rorty's book

Out of Left Field
                               Richard Rorty's call for a new
                               popular front.

                               By Jacob Weisberg

available at:
http://www.slate.com/StrangeBedfellow/98-05-29/StrangeBedfellow.asp
but only if you pay $15, I think it is, to subscribe to SLATE.  For
those who do not, here are some
excerpts:

Achieving Our Country tells members of
                               what Rorty calls the "cultural left" to
come
                               down from their postmodernist ivory tower

                               and think about how to make the country
they
                               live in a better place. Rorty says
radical
                               academicians should wipe that sophistical

                               smirk off their faces, lose their mocking

                               disdain for America, and view it more as
their
                               progressive ancestors did: as a great,
                               problem-filled country that must be
brought
                               into closer alignment with its ideals.


 But I think that what really
                alarms the right about Rorty is not his
                moments of rhetorical excess but rather the
                buried fear that the left might one day wake
                up and take his advice. If the alienated
                theorists of academe transformed themselves
                into a Rortyan left--a unified, engaged, and
                patriotic left--conservative columnists could
                run dry of material in a matter of weeks.
                       It wouldn't be good news for Republican
                politicians, either, if the left listened to Rorty
                and joined a common crusade for social
                betterment. His book argues not only that
                academic leftists, the heirs to the '60s New
                Left, need to become pro-American but also
                that they need to quit knocking heads with the
                heirs to the Old Left--the Cold War
                liberals--and vice versa. Rorty wants to draw
                a curtain over the distinction between liberals
                and leftists. We should all forget about our
                past conflicts, he says, and realize that we
                were always on the same side, more or less.


    In trying to persuade lefties of various
                               stripes to quit fighting, Rorty borrows a

                               strategy from pragmatist philosophy. He
takes
                               questions that he doesn't find useful to
his
                               cause--such as who was correct about
                               Vietnam or about the Cold War--and rules
                               them out of order. They aren't helpful to
us in
                               moving forward, so there is no point in
                               discussing them. But the issues that have
split
                               the American left in this century were
not the
                               expression of narcissistic small
differences.
                               They represented fundamental
splits--between
                               supporters of constitutional democracy
and its
                               opponents, between friends and enemies of

                               human rights, between people who believe
in
                               limited government and those who want an
                               overweening state. Arthur Schlesinger and

                               Angela Davis were not on the same side,
even
                               in the most general way.