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Kloppenberg’s esteem for Obama leads him to over-value Obama as an intellectual. Here the praise strains credulity. He deems Obama’s books “the most substantial books written by anyone elected president of the United States since Woodrow Wilson.” Obama is credited with being “able to interrogate his own convictions—to place them in a broader cultural and historical context by imaginatively scrutinizing them from a position centuries in the future—without abandoning them, much as William James did.” Of one excerpt from Obama’s prose, Kloppenberg writes that “neither Madison nor Jefferson, neither James nor Dewey … could have said it better.” Kloppenberg routinely presumes Obama to be “immersed” in the current intellectual debates of Harvard Law School, “wrestling with texts such as Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” and “probing the arguments in [Walter] Lippmann’s Drift and Mastery.” Isn’t it possible that Obama, like a lot of us who loaded up on humanities courses in college, left a few classic works on his shelves with their spines uncracked? Besides, does undergraduate and graduate reading really make one a full-fledged philosopher?
full: http://www.tnr.com/book/review/reading-obama-james-kloppenberg ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
