Duane Campbell
The book Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, may well offer some significant insights into the political viewpoints of President Obama. In addition, it is a prolonged essay concerning how the author sees the political philosophy of pragmatism and a history of how pragmatism has served in the U.S.
I found the book delightful in a number of ways. I particularly enjoyed Prof. Kloppenberg’s descriptions of the development of pragmatism as a political philosophy. The book is as much an essay on pragmatism as it is a description of the Obama philosophy. That is, the author is promoting intellectual pragmatism as a preferred philosophy and using the Obama experience as device to describe concrete implementation issues of pragmatism and the ascendance of pragmatism as a philosophy.
There are several interesting issues. Can a scholar describe well the political philosophy of an important leader by reading books by the President and reading the transcripts of his speeches? Is it far too early to be describing the philosophy of Barack Obama after only two years in office?
The book describes the detailed and interesting debates on philosophy, pragmatism, the role of Dewey, John Rawles, Kuhn, and others, critical legal theory, communitarianism, and the several major intellectual debates that were vigorous while Obama was at Harvard, and some of the debates today. Kloppenberg does not the examine a closely related question. An implied thesis of Reading Obama is that the intellectual fervor shaped Barack Obama, and now that he is President, these intellectual debates guide and influence public policy.
Certainly Barack Obama, as described by Kloppenberg, is a significant intellectual. I am not satisfied with the device of describing a viewpoint held by one or another of Obama’s professors at Harvard and then asserting that Barack Obama learned and adopted this particular position., or the summary of a position taken by a professor in the Harvard Law Review while Obama was editor and assuming that Obama adopted this particular nuanced position. This seems to me over interpretation.
