"About the utility of the argument I have little doubt, convinced as I am that nothing will resist the growing corporatization of the world save for a very broad coalition of anticorporatization folks on the left, all the way from the mealiest-mouthed of liberals to the stark-ravingest of Marxists. But I have grave doubts about whether Rorty’s “two lefts” analysis of the contemporary scene will further the creation of that coalition: unless we can see the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition as the double helix of leftist thought — and we should think especially here of issues such as immigration, disability, reproduction and motherhood, and criminal justice, where cultural politics and public policy are woven as tightly as any strand of DNA — no amnesty program for the sectarians of the past will suffice to remedy the two-left sectarianism of the present. The value of Achieving Our Country, then, does not lie in its accuracy about the past and present state of the left; it lies, instead, in its willingness to throw down gauntlets for the formation of a future left that can think beyond the impasses with which Achieving Our Country would leave us."
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Philosophers from the United StatesEducators from the United StatesPeople from New York CityMacArthur FellowsYale University alumni
Original Language: English
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Michael Bérubé, "The Lefts before 11 September", published in Rhetorical Occasions (2006)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rorty
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Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 in New York City – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher and pragmatist.
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