Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition by James T. Kloppenberg

Author:James T. Kloppenberg [Kloppenberg, James T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2010-08-17T08:59:00+00:00

EADERS ENTERING OBAMA'S BOOKS find themselves in a landscape that seems at first very different from the jagged contours and jarring conflicts between universalism and particularism, timelessness and historicism, science and hermeneutics. Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope appear to occupy a different world because they are directed less toward academic philosophers or social scientists than toward the much wider audience of American citizens. But Obama has been paying attention. To a striking degree, his sensibility has been shaped by the developments in American academic culture since the 1960s outlined in chapter 2, and in this chapter I want to demonstrate that underappreciated connection. Remember that Obama was trained in two of America's leading colleges, Occidental and Columbia. He earned his law degree at one of its leading law schools, Harvard, then taught law for more than a decade at another top-flight institution, the University of Chicago Law School.

In his books Obama never explicitly addresses his education or his teaching. It isn't necessary. His writing clearly reflects his experiences as a student and as a professor in turbulent times, and his books manifest his serious engagement with the life of the mind. As anyone reading this (or any other) book can attest, reading is not the most dramatic of human practices, and Obama the writer prefers flesh-and-blood characterizations to discourses on civic republicanism, philosophical pragmatism, the discourse ethics of deliberative democracy, and antifoundationalism. Yet as I hope readers of this book will also attest, reading can alter the way a person looks at the world. Obama's worldview emerged not only from his family, his friends, and his colleagues in the sharp-elbowed worlds of community organizing and electoral politics, decisive as those surely were. His worldview was also shaped by the debates that rocked the campuses where he studied and taught, debates about ideas as well as politics. Much as he might need to mask it on the campaign trail, where he demonstrates his impressive skill as a politician, his books make clear that Barack Obama is also very much an intellectual.

Of Obama's two principal books, many people prefer Dreams from My Father, a meditation on Obama's personal identity and the problems of race and cultural diversity in America. Much has been written on those issues already, and for good reason. To understand Obama's ideas about American culture and politics, however, his personal story must be placed in the framework provided by The Audacity of Hope, a book in which one can identify the echoes of earlier and more recent voices in the traditions of American political thought. Particularly important are his discussions of the Constitution, antebellum American democracy, Lincoln and the Civil War, and the reform movements of the Progressive, New Deal, and civil rights eras. From his well-informed and sophisticated analysis of those issues emerges a particular conception of democracy.

Perhaps not surprisingly for someone who studied and taught constitutional law, Obama writes incisively about the United States Constitution. Near the end of Dreams from My Father,

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