A philosopher turns on his own side. Richard Rorty splits twentieth century American leftism into two traditions and argues that the more useful one has gone quiet.

One tradition is reformist, and Rorty traces it through John Dewey: pragmatic, set on concrete gains, willing to take pride in the country as an unfinished job. The other is the cultural left, which he locates in the universities after Vietnam and exemplifies with Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Rorty grants that its diagnoses of American life land. His complaint is that it puts no program in their place, treats progress itself as suspect, and has taught a generation to hear patriotism as an endorsement of slavery, conquest and war.

The quarrel between the Old Left and the New during Vietnam sits at the center of the argument. Rorty reads the antiwar movement's victory as a strange one, arriving with the Nixon years and pushing disillusioned intellectuals toward High Theory and away from the ordinary business of politics.

Adapted from his 1997 Massey Lectures, the book keeps the speaking voice: direct, combative, light on jargon, pitched past the philosophy department. The case belongs to Rorty, and he argues it as a participant rather than as an observer.