The Sagebrush State: Nevada's History, Government, and Politics
Author: Michael W Bowers
Teachers of Nevada history and government at all levels will welcome The Sagebrush State. This clear, authoritative, and readable book offers a balanced, up-to-date view of the state of Nevada. The author has referred to all the appropriate primary and secondary sources in creating this compact volume. He relates the characteristics of Nevada politics and government to the state's historical development and provides an evenhanded look at Nevada's problems as well as its progress. The Sagebrush State is thoroughly documented, providing useful figures and tables, and includes the complete text of the state constitution for quick reference. This volume serves as a text for the Nevada Constitution component required for graduation from all Nevada colleges and universities. It is also an invaluable resource for civics teachers in secondary schools, for members of the media who report on state politics, and for the many newcomers to Nevada who want an accurate description of Nevada's origins and how the state works.
Look this: The 4 Hour Workweek or Before You Do
Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
Author: Richard Rorty
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 MasseyLectures 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."
Library Journal
Rorty contrasts two views of America: those of the Old Left and of the New Left. The Old Left he associates with Walt Whitman's "American Dream" and John Dewey's idea of an ever-evolving secular society of varied, autonomous agents whose evils are remediable because they result from failures of imagination. The New Left he associates with spectators who damn America for such past "atrocities" as slavery, the massacre of Indians, and the Vietnam War. Rorty claims that the Old Left was stubbornly reformist, whereas the New Left collaborates with and thereby empowers the Right by supplanting real politics with cultural issues. He urges the New Left to understand that our national character has not been settled but is still being formed. The book contrasts the two Lefts clearly enough, but the rest of it is rather foggy with occasional flashes of light. For larger academic libraries only.Robert Hoffman, York Coll., CUNY
Alan Ryan
Achieving Our Country is an appeal to American intellectuals to abandon the intransigent cynicism of the academic, cultural left and to return to the political ambitiohns of Emerson, Dewey, Herbert Croly and their allies. What Rorty has written -- as deftly, amusingly and cleverly as he always writes -- is a lay sermon for the untheological...[He argues] that we would do better to try to improve the world than lament its fallen condition. On that he will carry with him a good many readers. -- New York Times Book Review
NY Times Book Review
A witty and distinuished philosopher appeals to American intellectuals to return to the political ideals of Emerson, Dewey and other ancestors.
Tikkun - Michael Berube
[A] blueprint for nothing less than the renewal of the American left, a provocative challenge to left sectarianism of the past and present.
Kirkus Reviews
In this slim volume (from a series of lectures), eminent liberal political theorist Rorty passes judgment on the state of the US left. And he is not amused. Beginning from familiar places for him, John Dewey and Walt Whitman, Rorty (Humanities/Univ. Of Virginia) argues that the faith of these men in what the US might become, their dismissal of all closed systems of thinking, their turn from religious authority to secular joy in the contingent process of democratic creation are all aspects of leftist thought missing from today's left, much to its detriment. In place of the search for a moral identity that will inspire and unite us, the left todayþwhat he calls the "academic" or "cultural" leftþhas opted instead for a "detached spectatorship," condemnation without action or hope. Rorty traces the origins of this spectatorship to theorists such as Foucault, who insists on the irresistible ubiquitousness of power. The appeal of such spectatorship he traces to the US New Left and its experience with the Vietnam War. In Vietnam the US "sinned," became beyond redemption, and so the New Left turned its back on ever reforming such a place. The Left retreated to academia, theory, culture, and spectatorship. This is all, however, a very familiar scenario by now (if argued in an interestingly odd way), and one wonders why it needs repeating, Rorty seems only to be using the New Left as a straw person here, and his depiction of the "academic" Left is caricature. Assertion substitutes for analysis. Lapses in logic occur: He chastises the Left, for instance, for being both Marxist and "postmodern," yet the two tendencies stand mostly opposed to each other. Like an obscure clubrecording from a major jazz musician, this is a minor work from a profound thinker that perhaps only true devotees of Rorty will find of value.
Table of Contents:
| American National Pride: Whitman and Dewey | 1 | |
| The Eclipse of the Reformist Left | 39 | |
| A Cultural Left | 73 | |
| App | Movements and Campaigns | 111 |
| App | The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature | 125 |
| Notes | 141 | |
| Acknowledgments | 153 | |
| Index | 155 |
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