By ALAN BRINKLEY [Democracy] – Obama’s ideas and convictions do not themselves explain his performance as president. It is Obama’s political skills, not his ideas, that seem to be his problem.
One of [James] Kloppenberg’s most important claims [in Reading Obama] is that Obama embodies the spirit of pragmatism–not the colloquial pragmatism that is more or less the same thing as practicality, but the philosophical pragmatism that emerged largely from William James and John Dewey and continued to flourish through the work of Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and others. Kloppenberg provides an excellent summary of the pragmatic tradition–a tradition rooted in the belief that there are no eternal truths, that all ideas and convictions must meet the test of usefulness. (Or, as James put it, ideas have to “work.”) Josiah Royce, James’s Harvard colleague and friend, argued that behind all moral claims there must be some “absolute truth” or “absolute knowledge.” Without such absolutes, he (and many others) believed, individuals would have nothing on which to build a moral life. But the pragmatists insisted that every idea has to confront the test of relevance to its time and circumstances. There could be no easy recourse to an absolute truth, either from religion or ancient texts or even from contemporary philosophy. People and nations must live with the knowledge that even their deepest beliefs can be challenged and, if necessary, rejected.
What is the evidence that Obama shares that view? His years at Harvard Law School drew him into the pragmatic ideas that dominated much of the faculty, and so there is little doubt that he knew a great deal about the tradition of pragmatism. But despite Kloppenberg’s claim, it is not entirely clear that he wholly embraced it. In The Audacity of Hope, a book that was designed for his presidential campaign but that also contains much of what we know about his opinions and convictions, Obama makes clear that he has an interest in pragmatism, but he is not wholly committed to it. “It has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty,” he writes. “The hard, cold facts remind me that it was unbending idealists like William Lloyd Garrison…Denmark Vesey…Frederick Douglass…Harriet Tubman…who recognized that power would concede nothing without a fight.”
Continued at Democracy | More Chronicle & Notices.
