The Philosophers and the American Left

The American left, which has sometimes been poor in institutions, has always been wealthy in political philosophy—and you can see the wealth and its significance in two books of our own moment, one by the late Richard Rorty and the other by Michael Walzer. Perhaps Rorty's book is not completely of our moment. The book is Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, which came out from a university press in 1999 and lay in slumber for 17 years, until the catastrophic Election Day of 2016. Then the book awoke, and Achieving Our Country became a publishing sensation, such that, even today, it appears to be selling fairly well, for a book of its nature. Its success is owed to a single passage on page 90. Rorty wondered on that page what would happen if, one day, America's trade unionists and unskilled workers, the people who do not live in prosperous suburbs, ever came to notice that, in the American government and among the American elites, no one at all was even trying to defend them from the economic and social consequences of modern industrial trends.