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    The Education of Barack Obama: From Reading Obama
    The Education of Barack Obama: From Reading Obama
    The Education of Barack Obama: From Reading Obama
    Ebook84 pages53 minutes

    The Education of Barack Obama: From Reading Obama

    By James T. Kloppenberg

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    If you really want to know what makes Barack Obama tick, you need to understand his education. James T. Kloppenberg explains the rich American intellectual tradition that shapes Obama's beliefs and influences his actions--particularly his aversion to absolutes and his commitment to compromise. This look at Obama's education is a deeply rewarding education in itself.


    Princeton Shorts are brief selections taken from influential Princeton University Press books and produced exclusively in ebook format. Providing unmatched insight into important contemporary issues or timeless passages from classic works of the past, Princeton Shorts enable you to be an instant expert in a world where information is everywhere but quality is at a premium.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateMay 6, 2012
    ISBN9781400843121
    The Education of Barack Obama: From Reading Obama
    Author

    James T. Kloppenberg

    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 to American Thought.

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      Book preview

      The Education of Barack Obama - James T. Kloppenberg

      The Education of Barack Obama

      JAMES T. KLOPPENBERG

      A PRINCETON SHORTS selection from Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition

      If you really want to know what makes Barack Obama tick, you need to understand his education. James T. Kloppenberg explains the rich American intellectual tradition that shapes Obama’s beliefs and influences his actions—particularly his aversion to absolutes and his commitment to compromise. This look at Obama’s education is a deeply rewarding education in itself.

      PRINCETON SHORTS are brief selections taken from influential Princeton University Press books and produced exclusively in eBook format. Providing unmatched insight into important contemporary issues or timeless passages from classic works of the past, Princeton Shorts enable you to be an instant expert in a world where information is everywhere but quality is at a premium. For more information and a complete list of books in the series, please visit http://press.princeton.edu/PrincetonShorts.

      The Education of Barack Obama comprises chapter 1 from Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, by James T. Kloppenberg. Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press

      Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

      press.princeton.edu

      All Rights Reserved

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Kloppenberg, James T., 1951–

      Reading Obama : dreams, hope, and the American political tradition /

      James T. Kloppenberg.—1st ed.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-691-14746-8 (cloth : acid-free paper)

      1. Obama, Barack—Philosophy. 2. Obama, Barack—Knowledge and learning. 3. Obama, Barack—Knowledge—History. 4. United States—Politics and government. 5. Political culture—United States.

      I. Title.

      E908.3.K55 2011

      973.932092—dc22     2010020721

      British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

      Princeton Shorts edition, 2012

      eISBN 978-1-400-84312-1

      CONTENTS

      The Education of Barack Obama

      About the Author

      Related Titles

      THE EDUCATION OF BARACK OBAMA

      On the night he was elected president of the United States, Barack Obama proclaimed that our nation’s greatest strength is the enduring power of our ideals. That claim not only signaled Obama’s clear repudiation of the self-conscious tough-guy realism of the preceding eight years, it also suggested a dimension of the new president’s sensibility that has not received the attention it deserves. Most observers emphasized the novelty of Obama’s campaign, with its reliance on grass-roots contributions and its unprecedented use of electronic communications, and not surprisingly stressed the break from the American past represented by his election and his emphasis on hope and change. Many writers linked Obama with the recurrent American impulse to begin again, the Adamic aspiration that has manifested itself in our culture’s obsession with sloughing off the old and celebrating the new.

      Irresistible as that reading may be given Obama’s age and his race, it is a mistake. As he understands, he is a product of America’s past. Obama has demonstrated an exceptionally sophisticated and sustained engagement with the history of American thought and political culture. His approach to politics seems new only to those who lack his acquaintance with the venerable traditions of American democracy: respect for one’s opponents and a willingness to compromise with them. His commitment to conciliation derives from his understanding that in a democracy all victories are incomplete. In his words, no law is ever final, no battle truly finished, because any defeat can be redeemed and any triumph lost in the next vote. Building lasting support for new policies and substantive changes is not the work of months or even years but decades.

      Obama’s writings show his debts to earlier American traditions and demonstrate that he has a deeper interest in, and a firmer grip on, America’s past than has any president of the United States since Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The strands on which Obama has drawn, however, differ from those that have appealed to many Democrats in recent decades. In part for that reason, and even more significantly because his sensibility reflects the profound changes in American intellectual life since the 1960s, Obama’s ideas and his approach to American politics have thrown political observers off balance. His books, his speeches, and his political record make clear that he represents a hybrid of old and new, which explains why he puzzles so many contemporaries—supporters and critics alike—who see him through conventional and thus distorting lenses. Placing him in American intellectual history illuminates both the genuinely novel dimensions of his worldview, which have gone largely unnoticed, and the older traditions he seeks to resurrect. Obama’s vision of American history and his understanding of its present condition both reflect the profound changes American culture has undergone in recent decades. If we want to understand him, we must understand how he sees the present in light of the past, and also how he envisions the future in light of his own—and his nation’s—place within a global community that has undergone dramatic and unprecedented cultural transformations. As Obama put it when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on December 9, 2009, the rise of transnational institutions such as the United Nations, movements such as the demand for human rights, and the process of globalization have caused people everywhere to fear the loss of what they cherish in their particular identities—their race, their tribe, and perhaps most powerfully their religion. Balancing those apparently irresistible dynamics against the persistent appeal of local cultural traditions, finding a way to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable tugs of the universal against the particular, is the central dynamic of the twenty-first-century world. Obama has shown that he understands the sources of that struggle and the reasons why it is so much more difficult to resolve than most commentators on the left and right admit.

      A powerful wave of enthusiasm washed over the world in the wake of Obama’s election, so there were not many cynics among those listening when Obama spoke in Chicago on election night. In the light of day, however, skeptics might have been tempted to dismiss his observation about the enduring power of our ideals as just another piece of charming but empty rhetoric. Which parts of the American populace shared his understanding of our ideals, including his understanding

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