You might be interested in reading Aziz Rana's book on America's complicated relationship with republican notions of freedom and the various coalitions that have emerged to fight reaction and try and 'renovate' the project at various points in the country's history. I think many of the points about the odd character of American politics has faded in the last half-century. Associational life has genuinely withered and the biggest sources of divergent political outcomes here are path-dependent. Our arid political culture is more or less the arid political culture of Europe and Japan. Our class dealignment is theirs. Our economy is joined with theirs. On the flip side of things, trade liberalization and corporate consolidation, along with special arrangements like liquidity swap lines between central banks, seems to have brought the most powerful sections of the various 'national capitals' closer and closer together. I think these are all good reasons to try and develop more universal strategies, rather than lean into the better parts of Americana. But maybe you're right and we have to attend to the little differences in what is left of national culture. I'm all in favor of talking about freedom more and equality a bit less.
I broadly agree, but then would say that Europe's (or at least Germany's, the European country where I've clocked the most time) extreme clumsiness with racial questions is an immediately and obviously notable difference from America.
Man, this is good as hell, especially the third part. I’m an old unionist, but my dad and some other older guys I knew were big into the New Left and the SDS. This series has been a great examination of the critiques of that generation, and your own critiques of those critiques. I guess my own (unoriginal) criticism of the new left is that they were too suspicious of the old materialist tradition, without which tradition there’s no way forward for the Left. Thanks for writing this.
Erik Olin Wright devotes a big section to his book on "real utopias" to trying to push past the kind of thinking Rorty and other latter-day left pragmatists were doing about organizing to thinking about the actual scenarios that might push the left into some form of political power. Some of them require organizing, some are conjunctural accidents, some are ye olde classic "the contradictions heightened" kinds of things where a left just sort of slides into power because the system just shat itself so badly. I read Wright in some ways as trying to carry on with this sort of "old New Left" project and its attempts to be concrete in a way that the left of Occupy and afterwards has (sensibly, understandably) wanted to avoid.
I also remember the fashion at one point among some people on the left for calling Rorty et al "left conservatism", which I don't think Rorty warranted. I think there were some bien-pensant leftists/former leftists who did deserve the label--the sort who got so incensed about "identity politics" that that became their only target of note, the kind of people who kept shoving Walter Benn Michaels at people (without having read him, often) and they were often people who'd been very enamored of Rorty.
What role, if any, do you see for academic lefties? I get the point about parochial Scholaticism and the rarefied air of theory. Write more for general audiences (like Rorty's book)? Focus instead on teaching, cultivating the republican and civic humanism you point back to?
Thanks again for your reading of Rorty. As a 70 year old philosophy graduate student and political activist, I am glad someone else finds Rorty crucial. I worry about the anarchosyndicalist tradition, though, because of its tilt against electoral politics. This problem is endemic in the new DSA.
This was a really great piece--enthusiastically sign off on the back half. Feels great to have these views expressed in a concise and shareable form. To me, as, like a regular reader of the New Left Review, the main question about the left and its internal debates is "who"--who is the public for these debates? Where are there existing social bonds that can be activated to fight for socialism? My view is kind of that there aren't any, since workplaces are more atomized than ever, and that, despite a few high profile wins, actually the density of organized labor has gotten worse. In that respect, things are actually worse than they were in the 90s. And yet, what you say here about a national movement is also true. I'd be genuinely curious to hear yours, or anyone's, accounting for that contradiction.
Also the reflections on the left of the late 90s sparked some Proustian reveries here, including a long-submerged memory of taking my 8th grade girlfriend on a date to Revolution Books, where I bought her a copy of the Communist Manifesto. Didn't they also have a bunch of Dr. Seuss books?
I went to a lefty magnet school in Manhattan and the one person to oppose the War in Afghanistan (an admittedly lame UWS Jewish kid with a Bob Marley sticker on his locker who frequently "freestyled" entire Puffy verses at various talent shows) was roundly laughed at by everyone and had his locker defaced. Half of my friends who would go on to cast their first votes for Kerry supported the War in Iraq, thought that Palestine didn't "deserve' to govern itself, and gloated at the Euro's weakness compared to the dollar. I wouldn't call myself woke-aligned by any stretch of the imagination, but anyone who wants to go back to that either didn't live through it or is a psychopath.
Ha, yeah. As a mid-30s New Yorker, your Substack feels like a place I can really hang my hat. Don't mean to pry or anything, but where did you go to school?
I'm a bit surprised, also, the extent to which the Diallou (and also Louima) cases and the protests they sparked have been kind of forgotten. It seems to me that people actually understimate just how much of an achievement it was on BLM's part to nationalize the police brutality issue, which if I remember was seen as a specifically local to megacities like LA and NYC. (Though I guess it also caused, dialectically, a right-wing embrace of cops--in the Before Times you had Clint Eastwood's monkey shitting in cop cars in "Any Which Way But Loose" and Arnold Schwarzenegger blowing away a bunch of police officers in "The Terminator" without anyone batting an eye.)
Although it's buried in here, and more alluded to than stated, I think this is extremely solid summary of why (and how) the right has been successful in grabbing political power while the left has not.
I wrote my master's thesis last year on the possibilities of imagining a different future for our world. The three chapters deal with, respectively: Marcuse's diagnosis of the problems facing advanced industrial society; Arendt's concepts of action and natality, in combination with Marcuse's thought; and a fun, experimental combination of Marcuse, Ricoeur's work on metaphor and metaphoricity, Kuhn's paradigm shifts, and Rorty's work in Achieving Our Country (including the Movements vs Campaigns appendix).
I think you might get a kick out of reading it, so let me know if you're interested, and I'll get you a copy of it.
Thanks for all the great writing you're putting out.
My aim was to outline the value of Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory for the current era. His diagnosis of the problems that Western society and its population faced during the 1950s–70s, though, is not completely adequate to address the problems that we face in our age. Therefore, I aimed to augment his critical theory with Hannah Arendt’s concepts of action, natality, and the will.
Action is the uniquely human capacity to participate in the public sphere, especially in the context of politics—understood in the Ancient Greek sense of the word.
Natality is the uniquely human capacity to introduce novelty into the world, which is to say that we can interrupt natural processes of biology and history.
The will is the internal human capacity to project oneself into the future, willing that one does a certain thing and not another. It is characterized by the posture of an ‘I-will,’ and it aims to become an ‘I-will-and-I-can.’
The combination of Marcuse and Arendt’s various theories and concepts leads us to an ideal of politics, as developed by Christopher Holman. I teased out the possibilities that this will present to us, but concluded that it is difficult for us to achieve that ideal in our present state.
Therefore, I turned to Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, and Paul Ricoeur. Each of these three thinkers provides us with concepts that allow us to imagine the quantitative steps that we can take now that will, hopefully, lead us to this ideal.
Thomas Kuhn’s concepts of paradigms and ‘normal science,’ as well as Richard Rorty’s distinction between movements and campaigns provide us with more concrete ideas of what ‘quantitative development’ means. Paul Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor and metaphoricity can provide us with an understanding of what a guiding principle, such as inspiration or hope, can help us to achieve in attempting to effect concrete change.
You might be interested in reading Aziz Rana's book on America's complicated relationship with republican notions of freedom and the various coalitions that have emerged to fight reaction and try and 'renovate' the project at various points in the country's history. I think many of the points about the odd character of American politics has faded in the last half-century. Associational life has genuinely withered and the biggest sources of divergent political outcomes here are path-dependent. Our arid political culture is more or less the arid political culture of Europe and Japan. Our class dealignment is theirs. Our economy is joined with theirs. On the flip side of things, trade liberalization and corporate consolidation, along with special arrangements like liquidity swap lines between central banks, seems to have brought the most powerful sections of the various 'national capitals' closer and closer together. I think these are all good reasons to try and develop more universal strategies, rather than lean into the better parts of Americana. But maybe you're right and we have to attend to the little differences in what is left of national culture. I'm all in favor of talking about freedom more and equality a bit less.
I broadly agree, but then would say that Europe's (or at least Germany's, the European country where I've clocked the most time) extreme clumsiness with racial questions is an immediately and obviously notable difference from America.
Man, this is good as hell, especially the third part. I’m an old unionist, but my dad and some other older guys I knew were big into the New Left and the SDS. This series has been a great examination of the critiques of that generation, and your own critiques of those critiques. I guess my own (unoriginal) criticism of the new left is that they were too suspicious of the old materialist tradition, without which tradition there’s no way forward for the Left. Thanks for writing this.
Erik Olin Wright devotes a big section to his book on "real utopias" to trying to push past the kind of thinking Rorty and other latter-day left pragmatists were doing about organizing to thinking about the actual scenarios that might push the left into some form of political power. Some of them require organizing, some are conjunctural accidents, some are ye olde classic "the contradictions heightened" kinds of things where a left just sort of slides into power because the system just shat itself so badly. I read Wright in some ways as trying to carry on with this sort of "old New Left" project and its attempts to be concrete in a way that the left of Occupy and afterwards has (sensibly, understandably) wanted to avoid.
I also remember the fashion at one point among some people on the left for calling Rorty et al "left conservatism", which I don't think Rorty warranted. I think there were some bien-pensant leftists/former leftists who did deserve the label--the sort who got so incensed about "identity politics" that that became their only target of note, the kind of people who kept shoving Walter Benn Michaels at people (without having read him, often) and they were often people who'd been very enamored of Rorty.
What role, if any, do you see for academic lefties? I get the point about parochial Scholaticism and the rarefied air of theory. Write more for general audiences (like Rorty's book)? Focus instead on teaching, cultivating the republican and civic humanism you point back to?
yeah both of those sound good
Thanks again for your reading of Rorty. As a 70 year old philosophy graduate student and political activist, I am glad someone else finds Rorty crucial. I worry about the anarchosyndicalist tradition, though, because of its tilt against electoral politics. This problem is endemic in the new DSA.
To be clear I am not against electoralism at all
This was a really great piece--enthusiastically sign off on the back half. Feels great to have these views expressed in a concise and shareable form. To me, as, like a regular reader of the New Left Review, the main question about the left and its internal debates is "who"--who is the public for these debates? Where are there existing social bonds that can be activated to fight for socialism? My view is kind of that there aren't any, since workplaces are more atomized than ever, and that, despite a few high profile wins, actually the density of organized labor has gotten worse. In that respect, things are actually worse than they were in the 90s. And yet, what you say here about a national movement is also true. I'd be genuinely curious to hear yours, or anyone's, accounting for that contradiction.
Also the reflections on the left of the late 90s sparked some Proustian reveries here, including a long-submerged memory of taking my 8th grade girlfriend on a date to Revolution Books, where I bought her a copy of the Communist Manifesto. Didn't they also have a bunch of Dr. Seuss books?
I went to a lefty magnet school in Manhattan and the one person to oppose the War in Afghanistan (an admittedly lame UWS Jewish kid with a Bob Marley sticker on his locker who frequently "freestyled" entire Puffy verses at various talent shows) was roundly laughed at by everyone and had his locker defaced. Half of my friends who would go on to cast their first votes for Kerry supported the War in Iraq, thought that Palestine didn't "deserve' to govern itself, and gloated at the Euro's weakness compared to the dollar. I wouldn't call myself woke-aligned by any stretch of the imagination, but anyone who wants to go back to that either didn't live through it or is a psychopath.
sounds like we were kids around the same time!
Ha, yeah. As a mid-30s New Yorker, your Substack feels like a place I can really hang my hat. Don't mean to pry or anything, but where did you go to school?
I'm a bit surprised, also, the extent to which the Diallou (and also Louima) cases and the protests they sparked have been kind of forgotten. It seems to me that people actually understimate just how much of an achievement it was on BLM's part to nationalize the police brutality issue, which if I remember was seen as a specifically local to megacities like LA and NYC. (Though I guess it also caused, dialectically, a right-wing embrace of cops--in the Before Times you had Clint Eastwood's monkey shitting in cop cars in "Any Which Way But Loose" and Arnold Schwarzenegger blowing away a bunch of police officers in "The Terminator" without anyone batting an eye.)
Although it's buried in here, and more alluded to than stated, I think this is extremely solid summary of why (and how) the right has been successful in grabbing political power while the left has not.
John,
I wrote my master's thesis last year on the possibilities of imagining a different future for our world. The three chapters deal with, respectively: Marcuse's diagnosis of the problems facing advanced industrial society; Arendt's concepts of action and natality, in combination with Marcuse's thought; and a fun, experimental combination of Marcuse, Ricoeur's work on metaphor and metaphoricity, Kuhn's paradigm shifts, and Rorty's work in Achieving Our Country (including the Movements vs Campaigns appendix).
I think you might get a kick out of reading it, so let me know if you're interested, and I'll get you a copy of it.
Thanks for all the great writing you're putting out.
My aim was to outline the value of Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory for the current era. His diagnosis of the problems that Western society and its population faced during the 1950s–70s, though, is not completely adequate to address the problems that we face in our age. Therefore, I aimed to augment his critical theory with Hannah Arendt’s concepts of action, natality, and the will.
Action is the uniquely human capacity to participate in the public sphere, especially in the context of politics—understood in the Ancient Greek sense of the word.
Natality is the uniquely human capacity to introduce novelty into the world, which is to say that we can interrupt natural processes of biology and history.
The will is the internal human capacity to project oneself into the future, willing that one does a certain thing and not another. It is characterized by the posture of an ‘I-will,’ and it aims to become an ‘I-will-and-I-can.’
The combination of Marcuse and Arendt’s various theories and concepts leads us to an ideal of politics, as developed by Christopher Holman. I teased out the possibilities that this will present to us, but concluded that it is difficult for us to achieve that ideal in our present state.
Therefore, I turned to Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, and Paul Ricoeur. Each of these three thinkers provides us with concepts that allow us to imagine the quantitative steps that we can take now that will, hopefully, lead us to this ideal.
Thomas Kuhn’s concepts of paradigms and ‘normal science,’ as well as Richard Rorty’s distinction between movements and campaigns provide us with more concrete ideas of what ‘quantitative development’ means. Paul Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor and metaphoricity can provide us with an understanding of what a guiding principle, such as inspiration or hope, can help us to achieve in attempting to effect concrete change.