2018年2月3日 星期六

Achieving Our Country:Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, 築就我們的國家:20世紀美國左派思想





Achieving Our Country
Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

Richard Rorty, HUP, 1999


The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies

American National Pride: Whitman and Dewey
The Eclipse of the Reformist Left
A Cultural Left
Appendixes
Movements and Campaigns
The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index



築就我們的國家:20世紀美國左派思想


作者: (美)羅蒂
出版社:生活‧讀書‧新知三聯書店
出版日期:2006/2014



目錄
美國的民族自豪感:惠特曼與杜威
改良左派的衰落
文化左派
附錄
社會運動與政治活動
文學經典的啟迪價值
致謝


知識分子與民族理想


羅蒂追述20世紀60年代以前老左派的思想成就,評點60年代至今文化左派的功過得失,他指出,為了「築就我們的國家」,追求美國的建國理想,知識分子應做出更為腳踏實地的努力。

《築就我們的國家:20世紀美國左派思想》源於羅蒂1997年所作的「麥西美國文明史系列講座」。書中的羅蒂自始至終慷慨激昂、充滿自信,他旨在激勵美國左派知識分子積極參與國內事條,重新點燃他們心中的熱情,從而恢復美國文化生活的平衡。

理查德•羅蒂(RichardRorty,1931-2007),當代美國最有影響力的哲學家、思想家,美國新實用主義哲學和后現代主義的代表人物之一。羅蒂在耶魯大學取得哲學博士學位,曾執教於普林斯頓大學、弗吉尼亞大學、斯坦福大學。羅蒂的主要著作在國內出版的有:《哲學和自然之鏡》及《后哲學文化》等。

Must the sins of America’s past poison its hope for the future? Lately the American Left, withdrawing into the ivied halls of academe to rue the nation’s shame, has answered yes in both word and deed. In Achieving Our Country, one of America’s foremost philosophers challenges this lost generation of the Left to understand the role it might play in the great tradition of democratic intellectual labor that started with writers like Walt Whitman and John Dewey.

How have national pride and American patriotism come to seem an endorsement of atrocities—from slavery to the slaughter of Native Americans, from the rape of ancient forests to the Vietnam War? Achieving Our Country traces the sources of this debilitating mentality of shame in the Left, as well as the harm it does to its proponents and to the country. At the center of this history is the conflict between the Old Left and the New that arose during the Vietnam War era. Richard Rorty describes how the paradoxical victory of the antiwar movement, ushering in the Nixon years, encouraged a disillusioned generation of intellectuals to pursue “High Theory” at the expense of considering the place of ideas in our common life. In this turn to theory, Rorty sees a retreat from the secularism and pragmatism championed by Dewey and Whitman, and he decries the tendency of the heirs of the New Left to theorize about the United States from a distance instead of participating in the civic work of shaping our national future.

In the absence of a vibrant, active Left, the views of intellectuals on the American Right have come to dominate the public sphere. This galvanizing book, adapted from Rorty’s Massey Lectures of 1997, takes the first step toward redressing the imbalance in American cultural life by rallying those on the Left to the civic engagement and inspiration needed for “achieving our country.”

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