Is Barack Obama an Intellectual?

Yes, according to Harvard historian James Kloppenberg, the author of a forthcoming book on Obama’s ideas. The New York Times explains:

When the Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg decided to write about the influences that shaped President Obama’s view of the world, he interviewed the president’s former professors and classmates, combed through his books, essays, and speeches, and even read every article published during the three years Mr. Obama was involved with the Harvard Law Review (“a superb cure for insomnia,” Mr. Kloppenberg said). What he did not do was speak to President Obama.  

“He would have had to deny every word,” Mr. Kloppenberg said with a smile. The reason, he explained, is his conclusion that President Obama is a true intellectual — a word that is frequently considered an epithet among populists with a robust suspicion of Ivy League elites. 

In New York City last week to give a standing-room-only lecture about his forthcoming intellectual biography, “Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition,” Mr. Kloppenberg explained that he sees Mr. Obama as a kind of philosopher president, a rare breed that can be found only a handful of times in American history. 

Kloppenberg concludes that Obama is a pragmatist:

To Mr. Kloppenberg the philosophy that has guided President Obama most consistently is pragmatism, a uniquely American system of thought developed at the end of the 19th century by William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce. It is a philosophy that grew up after Darwin published his theory of evolution and the Civil War reached its bloody end. More and more people were coming to believe that chance rather than providence guided human affairs, and that dogged certainty led to violence.
 

Pragmatism maintains that people are constantly devising and updating ideas to navigate the world in which they live; it embraces open-minded experimentation and continuing debate. “It is a philosophy for skeptics, not true believers,” Mr. Kloppenberg said. 

The president was also influenced, Kloppenberg concludes, by a wide range of thinkers, past and present, including Weber, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Emerson, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Gordon Wood, John Rawls, Hilary Putnam, Clifford Geertz, Martha Minow, and Cass Sunstein.

In responding to Dinesh D’Souza’s recent argument that Obama has been most deeply influenced by anti-colonialist literature, Kloppenberg said, “Adams and Jefferson were the only anti-colonialists whom Obama has been affected by.” Classic!

Tim Lacy provides some more commentary on the article and Kloppenberg’s speech at U.S. Intellectual History.

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