5.2 Kloppenberg (2012)
Kloppenberg, James T. (2012) Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope and the American Tradition [paperback edition with new preface; hardback (2011)]. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Quick Look
Author James T. Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren Professor of American History and chair of the History Department at Harvard University. His books include Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920; The Virtues of Liberalism; and A Companion of American Thought. |
This Resource’s Key Interpretations and Insights Related to the Purposes of This Website
I think this book provides the best explanation of why Obama governs in the unconventional way he does, and why it has worked better than most people believe it has even in the midst of unprecedented obstructionism.
(1) This book provides the only detailed explanation of why President Obama operates politically the way he does. He shows how his upbringing, education and experiences have shaped his style of political initiative, interaction and decision making, which is unique in today’s radically polarized American politics. Since he is an historian of ideas, Kloppenberg is very well situated to illuminate the deep historical foundation of Obama’s perspective on healthy and unhealthy American politics.
(2) Kloppenberg shows why Obama is neither a dangerous leftist extremist (the common misinterpretation on the right) nor the unprincipled, too-quick-to-compromise loser (the unfair interpretation on the left). He was writing prior to the 2012 election, and was asking this question: will Obama’s very different style of leadership lead to a healthier kind of American politics with his reelection or will it be rejected largely because it’s been misunderstood? Kloppenberg hoped his book would help lead to the former outcome.
I think this book provides the best explanation of why Obama governs in the unconventional way he does, and why it has worked better than most people believe it has even in the midst of unprecedented obstructionism.
(1) This book provides the only detailed explanation of why President Obama operates politically the way he does. He shows how his upbringing, education and experiences have shaped his style of political initiative, interaction and decision making, which is unique in today’s radically polarized American politics. Since he is an historian of ideas, Kloppenberg is very well situated to illuminate the deep historical foundation of Obama’s perspective on healthy and unhealthy American politics.
(2) Kloppenberg shows why Obama is neither a dangerous leftist extremist (the common misinterpretation on the right) nor the unprincipled, too-quick-to-compromise loser (the unfair interpretation on the left). He was writing prior to the 2012 election, and was asking this question: will Obama’s very different style of leadership lead to a healthier kind of American politics with his reelection or will it be rejected largely because it’s been misunderstood? Kloppenberg hoped his book would help lead to the former outcome.
Endorsements
This quote on the book jacket by Robert D. Putnam, Harvard University, shows the significance of this text for the 2012 election: “An intellectual biography of a practicing politician might nowadays seem a contradiction in terms, but James Kloppenberg, one of America’s leading intellectual historians, draws penetrating insights from a close examination of the ideas that animate Barack Obama. Reading Obama shows the powerful impact on Obama’s politics of his engagement with the late-twentieth-century revival of philosophical pragmatism and civic republicanism. Obama takes ideas seriously, and Kloppenberg details why that maters for all of us. This is a fine example of contemporary intellectual history.”
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"Jim Kloppenberg, one of the country's finest intellectual historians, has come up with a remarkable idea as to how we can understand President Obama: just read what he has written and take it seriously. Think of Kloppenberg as the Bob Woodward of investigative philosophical analysis. He's written a fine and hugely informative book." ~E.J. Dionne, syndicated columnist and author of Souled Out and Our Divided Political Heart. ~back cover of the paperback edition
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"Derided by the Right as dangerous and by the Left as spineless, Barack Obama puzzles observers. In Reading Obama, James T. Kloppenberg reveals the sources of Obama's ideas and explains why his principled aversion to absolutes does not fit contemporary partisan categories. Obama's commitments to deliberation and experimentation derive from sustained engagement with American democratic thought and from deeply rooted--although currently unfashionable--convictions about how a democracy must deal with conflict.
In a new preface, Kloppenberg explains why Obama has stuck with his commitment to compromise in the first three years of his presidency, despite the criticism it has provoked." ~Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York Review of Books |
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