Reading Obama, by James T. Kloppenberg

Books on Barack Obama are proliferating. Recent additions include biographies, political analyses, a look into Obama's African family tree, books on his handling of specific issues and books on race and politics in American society. Among these, James Kloppenberg's intellectual contextualization stands out.

Kloppenberg began his study of Obama as an intellectual and political philosopher while lecturing at Cambridge University, and his engagement with European interpretations of Obama adds a fascinating counterpoint to his reading of American political traditions. Kloppen­berg knows that Americans can be reluctant to perceive their most prominent politicians as philosophers, but he believes that Obama's philosophical commitments put his policies in perspective.

Kloppenberg places Obama's writings and speeches into a rich context of both historical and contemporaneous texts. James Madison, John Dewey, Ralph Elli­son, John Rawls and Abraham Lincoln come into the story. Kloppen­berg carefully explains each particular contribution to Obama's political thought. He acknowledges that Obama's own writings—especially his popular books Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope—were written for a general, not an academic, audience, but he believes that Obama is a gifted narrator who is able to interpret significant traditions of democracy and rearticulate them for a new political moment. Even while he does not agree with every Obama policy (he is especially critical of his actions on the economy and Afghan­istan), Kloppenberg admires Obama's integration of these intellectual traditions.