Duane Campbell
The book Reading Obama 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.
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?
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.
Certainly Barack Obama, as described by Kloppenberg, is a significant intellectual. I am uncomfortable 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.
