Achieving our Country by Richard Rorty

"The United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time". This is great little book that every American should have read in high school (takes some mental maturity), by one of Americas greatest philosophers--and essential for understanding Obama's pragmatism and philosophy of hope." Is there any doubt American (and the world) has fallen into (or been driven by) corporate feudalism?

 

The quote above is from Walt Whitman, who understood "God" as the historical-poetic process, and America as "the greatest poem."

 John Dewey's principle problem of (for) America was "institutionalized selfishness"--boy did he nail it!

"Who would be the greatest poet must attract his own land, body and soul to himself and hang on its neck with incomparable love and plunge his seminal muscle into its merits and demerits." W. Whitman 26

‎"The Right thinks that our country already has a moral identity, and hopes to keep that identity intact. It fears economic and political change, and therefore easily becomes the pawn of the rich and powerful--the people whose selfish interests are served by forestalling such change." R. Rorty

‎"A more highly socialized democracy is the only practical substitute on the part of convinced democrats for an excessively individualized democracy". p48 Herbert Crowly's "The Promise of American Life". (46)

"To step into the world that some of these leftists inhabit [I'm thinking of Chris Hedges], is to move out of a world in which the citizens of the world can join forces to resist sadism and selfishness into a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce." Richard Rorty in "Achieving our Country".96

 

"The abstract best should not be the enemy of the better" R. Rorty 105

"...literature will not succeed in resisting philosophy [the endless analysis of platonic universals] unless literary critics think of it as having nothing to do with eternity, knowledge, or stability [fundamentalisms] and everything to do with futurity and hope--with taking the world by the throat and insisting that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined." 138