Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America is a book written by American philosopher Richard Rorty. In this book, Rorty differentiates between what he sees as the two sides of the Left, a critical Left and a progressive Left. He criticizes the critical Left, which is exemplified by post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault and postmodernists such as Jean-François Lyotard. Although these intellectuals make insightful claims about the ills of society, Rorty holds that they provide no alternatives and even present progress as problematic at times. On the other hand, the progressive Left, exemplified for Rorty by John Dewey, makes progress its priority in its goal of "achieving our country." Rorty sees the progressive Left as acting in the philosophical spirit of pragmatism. A philosopher is a person devoted to studying and producing results in philosophy. ... Richard McKay Rorty (born October 4, 1931 in New York City) is an American philosopher. ... Look up Left and left in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Post-structuralism is a body of work that followed in the wake of structuralism, and sought to understand the Western world as a network of structures, as in structuralism, but in which such structures are ordered primarily by local, shifting differences (as in deconstruction) rather than grand binary oppositions and... Michel Foucault Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 – June 26, 1984) was a French philosopher who held a chair at the Collège de France, which he gave the title The History of Systems of Thought. ... Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated pomo) is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... An intellectual is a person who uses his or her intellect to study, reflect, and speculate on a variety of different ideas. ... John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, whose thought has been greatly influential in the United States and around the world. ... Philosophy (from the Greek words philos and sophia meaning love of wisdom) is understood in different ways historically and by different philosophers. ... Pragmatism is belief of the teaching of philosophy which originated in the United States in the late 1800s. ...