In my own teaching of American history, I have found particularly valuable Hollinger's book Postethnic America, not only because it captures the changes of recent decades but because it places those changes in the much longer trajectory running from the late nineteenth-century imposition of Jim Crow through the immigration restriction of the 1920s to the recent emergence of the ideals of color blindness and multiculturalism. Hollinger holds out an ideal that he calls "affiliation by revokable assent," by which he means that individuals should enjoy the freedom to embrace or renounce any aspects of their biological and cultural inheritance that they choose. Gates and Sollors have advanced their own versions of this idea. But these scholars contrast white ethnics' power to highlight or downplay any part of their increasingly complicated lineage, if they choose to do so, to the unfreedom of ascribed or imposed identity forced on blacks by America's "onedrop rule," which stipulates that any African blood makes a person legally black.
Although demography may be destiny, and the rates of intermarriage among members of most ethnic groups continue to accelerate, the black-white divide in the United States remains sharp. In most parts of the world, Barack Obama is considered to be mixed race. In America, he is black, and he cannot escape everything that others ascribe to him or impose on him as a result of that simple fact and all it implies. Although Obama acknowledges and celebrates the changes that the United States has experienced since the civil rights movement, he is justifiably cautious about declaring the battle won. Obama resists the strategic racial solidarity so persuasively championed by Tommie Shelby in We Who Are Dark in favor of a position closer to Eddie Glaude's explicit embrace of philosophical pragmatism in his book In a Shade of'Blue. Glaude finds inspiration in the writings of James and Dewey for his an- tiessentialist politics, which is oriented toward affirming the varieties of African American religious experiences for purposes of democratic reconstruction. According to both Shelby and Glaude, racial and cultural identities are not something fixed, a treasure to be uncovered through ar chaeology, but a set of resources to be deployed pragmatically. Sharing that insight, they differ in their judgments concerning the most fruitful strategic choices.
A controversy that erupted in the summer of 2009 illustrates just how volatile such issues remain. When Gates returned to his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from a trip to China, he found himself confronted by a white police officer sent to investigate a reported break-in. After showing identification to prove he was standing in his own home, the African American Gates objected to the officer's manner, the officer objected to Gates's, and the distinguished and famously personable scholar found himself hauled off in handcuffs. When Obama used the word "stupidly" to describe the way the Cambridge police responded-a word that I and most people who know Gates consider appropriate (if ill-considered) in the circumstances-he ignited a firestorm. No matter what Obama said or did, including inviting both men to the White House for a beer, the furor would not die. The president's campaign to "lower the temperature" in America not only on the issue of race but on the other issues of the culture wars crashed against a wall of prejudice that had been obscured but not destroyed by his election. Whatever progress has been made, Americans continue to interpret such highly charged interactions through filters that predispose them reflexively to blame blacks or whites whenever things get out of hand. The reverberations of the Gates affair indicate how very far the United States remains from being a postracial society: polls indi cate that a poorly chosen adverb, uttered at the end of a long press conference, ignited brush fires of racist invective that might have long-term consequences for Obama's presidency. Racial discrimination may be illegal, but racism persists.
The issue of race remains uniquely volcanic in American history, and that fact reminds Obama that pragmatism and democracy are sometimes not enough. In The Audacity of Hope he points out that slavery was the one question in American history on which there could be, finally, no compromise. Indeed, from the very beginning, when the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia almost four centuries ago, slavery and its legacy have provided the overwhelming, undeniable proof of the limitations of the American democratic project. Notwithstanding the "genius" of the amendable Constitution, its architects were, to repeat Obama's apt phrase, "blind to the whip and the chain." The persistence of slavery mocked the ideals of freedom and equality and the ethic of reciprocity. It cast a shadow over Americans' boasts about the comparatively small gaps between their rich and their poor. Obama refers to the heroic struggles fought by slaves and abolitionists, who learned from experience that on the question of slavery, "power would concede nothing without a fight." The intransigence of Frederick Douglass and the moral integrity of those who demanded the immediate end of slavery not the moderation urged by their antislavery allies-changed the climate of debate. Tellingly, Obama draws from the Civil War the lesson that "it has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty."
Yet from his realization that the battle to end slavery was ultimately won by those who refused to compromise, Obama draws a lesson both unexpected and unconventional, especially for an African American on the left. He writes that he is chastened by the example of such antislavery absolutists whenever he encounters zealots today. Although he deprecates the extremism of some contemporary activists, he finds himself wondering if they might someday be thought right and the rest of us wrong. He is very careful not to extend that observation to any particular contemporary controversy, but readers cannot help making that leap themselves. Nothing in Obama's books suggests that he has second thoughts about his stances on hot-button issues such as abortion, capital punishment, gun control, or gay rights. Yet his measured comments concerning the implications of our contemporary admiration for radical abolitionists shows yet again the sophistication of his historicism. "I'm reminded," he writes, "that deliberation and the constitutional order may sometimes be the luxury of the powerful, and that it has sometimes been the cranks, the zealots, the prophets, the agitators, and the unreasonable in other words, the absolutists that have fought for a new order." It was Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and John Brown, not their moderate opponents, who forced the issue of abolition. With that awareness, Obama continues, "I can't summar ily dismiss those possessed of similar certainty today-the antiabortion activist who pickets my town hall meeting, or the animal rights activist who raids a laboratory no matter how deeply I disagree with their views." It is one thing to acknowledge that we have come a long way from slavery and from other cruelties of the past. All politicians can play that tune. It is quite another to extend that logic to one's own convictions, which Obama does by raising the open-ended question about how posterity will judge our own moderation and our own forms of zealotry. In that brief, remarkable, and little noticed passage about his reaction to contemporary extremists in The Audacity of Hope, Obama again demonstrates his acute selfconsciousness.
Obama acknowledges, perhaps more fully than any prominent figure in twenty-first-century American public life, the undeniable undertow exerted by historicism and antifoundationalism on all our most deeply held convictions. Yet he is not paralyzed by that understanding. Obama is 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. Speaking at the dedication of the memorial erected on the Boston Common to honor the black and white members of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment in the Civil War, James passionately praised their heroic sacrifice. James understood, more clearly than some critics who have characterized his philosophy of pragmatism as lacking backbone, that one can be willing to die for a principle even though he understands that it may be contingent. For James, that was the meaning of "civic courage" in a democracy. Obama's awareness of the precariousness of even our most deeply held beliefs seems to me among the most unusual features of his sensibility. Some critics think it makes his convictions less solid. They may be proven right. But his heartfelt comments about American soldiers (including his own maternal grandfather, who fought in World War II) indicate the depth of, and the reasons for, his admiration for those who have shown themselves willing not only to affirm but to die in defense of their nation's principles of freedom, equality, and democracy.
Will Obama's exceptional self-consciousness make him less willing to kill for those principles than some other presidents have been? The strident tone of his inaugural address and the startling speed and extent of his expansion of the American military's role in Afghanistan suggest the opposite. In the sphere of international relations, Obama may prove no more successful in using philosophical pragmatism to harness his ambitions than was Woodrow Wilson. Dewey cheered the pragmatist strand he discerned in Wilson's decision to enter World War I; he accepted Wilson's explanation that the nation was going to war to create an international organization that would end war. But as wars so often do, that war had a way of transforming even the most scrupulously principled philosophical pragmatists into zealots. Dewey later accepted Bourne's criticism and regretted his support for Wilson's failed crusade.
Obama seems convinced that the United States can control the threat of terrorism only by transforming a nation that for centuries has consisted of a loose confederation of largely autonomous and often cantankerous clans into a united, stable, law-abiding constitutional democracy. He has not always been so sure of America's power to perform such alchemy. In The Audacity of Hope he quotes from his October 2002, speech against the Iraq War. He predicted, accurately, that even "a successful war against Iraq will require a U. S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences." Invading Iraq "without a clear rationale and without strong international support" would risk strengthening the appeal of Al Qaeda, which can be defeated only if the United States can win the long battle for the hearts and minds of Muslim dissidents worldwide. Many Americans skeptical about Obama's decision to commit more U.S. troops in Afghanistan as I amwonder whether he has read that speech since becoming commander in chief.
A string of self-confident world powers, beginning with Alexander the Great and continuing through Great Britain in the nineteenth century and the Soviet Union in the twentieth, have failed to remake Afghanistan in their image. If the United States follows their lead, we will see whether Obama's stated commitment to the critical assessment of results-and the resolution to change course when necessary rather than follow dogma blindly-extends from the domain of domestic politics to that of foreign affairs. Time will tell whether he has the courage to admit a mistake. Obama wrote, concerning Iraq, that he does not oppose every war, only "a dumb war, a rash war, a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics." Because he understands that democracy requires deliberation, an ethic of reciprocity, and a culture committed to the peaceful resolution of conflicts, he knows that the United States "cannot impose democracy with the barrel of a gun." But with Al Qaeda now thought to be headquartered somewhere in the mountains of Pakistan, and with corruption apparently as pervasive as ever in Afghan public affairs, many Americans will continue to ask whether war in Afghanistan makes any more sense than did the war in Iraq that Obama eloquently opposed. As was true of Wilson's campaign on behalf of democracy, the stakes are high, the outcome impossible to predict.
Only weeks after committing more United States troops to Afghanistan, Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. Like some of his other major addresses, which he chose not to trust to staffers or his speech writers, Obama crafted his Oslo speech himself. It merits analysis, because it encapsulates many of his signature themes. He began by distinguishing between the war in Afghanistan, which he deemed a just war with the support of forty-two nations because of the 9/11 attacks, and other wars he judged unjustifiable. He did not have to specify the Iraq War, launched without provocation by his predecessor. The reference was clear. Obama then invoked the universal ideals embraced by the international community since Wilson first proposed the League of Nations and the United Nations was established, ideals including liberty and self-determination, equality and the rule of law. Cognizant of the criticism directed against these lofty principles since the advent of antifoundationalism, Obama acknowledged that some observers dismiss them as lovely but hollow rationalizations trotted out to justify the West's effort to remake the world in its image. He acknowledged too the anxieties of those who worry that many of the world's distinct, particular cultures will be annihilated as the West proceeds with its own projects. It is as difficult to imagine another American president raising those objections in an international forum as it is revealing that Obama felt compelled to address them directly.
Responding to such critics, Obama explained that he considers the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights a statement of principles not masking the "enlightened self-interest" of the United States or the developed world but expressing genuinely "universal aspirations." He justified the UN's commitment to enforce those principles when they are violated, however, not because they embody the West's greater wisdom but instead because such power is made necessary by "the imperfections of man and the limits of reason." Knowing our weaknesses as well as our strengths, Obama continued, enables us to wrestle with the persistent challenge of international affairs, "reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths that war is sometimes necessary, and that war at some level is an expression of human folly." To that end, Obama proclaimed, he intends to hold the United States accountable in its conduct of war, although he did not address the use of drones to hunt Al Qaeda in Pakistan. He also pledged to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and diminish the stockpiles of the nations that already possess them, a promise he has taken a first step toward keeping through an arms-reduction treaty with Russia. Finally, he vowed to combat outrages such as "genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo, repression in Burma." He did not mention Guantanamo.
Although Obama acknowledged that such lofty aims evoke suspicion from self-styled "realists," he replied bluntly that he rejects the notion that we are faced with "a stark choice between the narrow pursuit of interests or an endless campaign to impose our values around the world." Choosing his words with care, he sketched out a path between two very different contrasts, the first between Theodore Roosevelt's "big stick" and Woodrow Wilson's internationalism, the second between blanket condemnations of American foreign policy (such as that of his least favorite Columbia professor, Edward Said) and George W. Bush's blanket defense. As he had done in his essay as a Columbia undergraduate, Obama recommended engaging the leaders of nations charged with oppressing their own people through "painstaking diplomacy," and he invoked the examples of Richard Nixon in China, Pope John Paul in Poland, and Ronald Reagan in Berlin to illustrate the value of such efforts. He addressed directly the nagging conflict between the lure of universalism and the hard facts of particularism. Strikingly, he sought to resolve it by subjecting his own nation's commitments to critical scrutiny. "No matter how callously defined, neither America's interests nor the world's-are served by the denial of human aspirations. So even as we respect the unique culture and traditions of different countries, America will always be a voice for those aspirations that are universal." Unlike some Americans, Obama rejected the notion that every American cause is just. But unlike some of America's critics, he insisted that no cause is to be deemed unjust simply because the United States has adopted it.
As he did in his 2006 Washington speech on religion and politics and in his discussion of those issues in The Audacity of'Hope, Obama faced directly the thorny question of religion. He directed his argument both to his Oslo audience of overwhelmingly secular Europeans and his religious and secular fellow citizens back home. In stark contrast to the language used by his predecessor, he balanced the common charge that "religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam" against the "amply recorded" injustice and cruelty of the Crusades launched by Christians. Holy wars, he observed, reframing the formulation he used for Wallis's conference, obliterate the pro portionality that should govern all combat. If you think you are doing God's will, "then there is no need for restraint." Again Obama was relying on the idea of finding, or building, an overlapping consensus, but this time it extended beyond his own nation to the world. The selfrighteous recourse to violence as a first resort mocks "the very purpose of faith for the one rule that lies at the heart of every major religion is that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us."
Obama deliberately tied the principles undergirding the peacekeeping efforts of the United Nations to the "law of love" that has "always been the core struggle of human nature." Once again he couched that struggle not in terms of triumphant proclamations of the justice of our cause but in strikingly different terms: "we are fallible. We make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil." Note Obama's use of the first- rather than second-person pronoun, a formulation that places the United States, and the United Nations, within the circle of the irrational, the blind, the fallen, and the fallible rather than outside it, in a privileged space from which it can self-righteously judge other nations and punish them with impunity. From our multiple religious and ethical traditions we Americans should not only draw the inspiration of a shared ideal, such as the golden rule or the Christian law of love. We should also draw the lesson of humility concerning our capacity to understand as well as adhere to such maxims. Just as no individual, and no culture, holds a monopoly on truth, so no nation should take for granted that it acts for the benefit of mankind. Continuing scrutiny of one's motives and one's behavior is made necessary by the limits of reason and the temptation of pride. In the international as well as the domestic arena, deliberative engagement with one's adversaries provides the best means to test the viability and persuasiveness of one's cause. Unobjectionable, perhaps even noble, as a motive, invocations of high ideals cannot serve as a warrant in foreign affairs any more than in American politics. We cannot claim certainty; we must aim toward creating provisional, and fragile, conditions for overlapping consensus.
Finally, in his Nobel acceptance speech Obama linked two other themes that have marked his distinctive writings on justice. First, he invoked Roosevelt's phrase "freedom from want" as an essential element of "a just peace." Not only should the international community work to secure civil and political rights, crucial as those are. As Dewey insisted repeatedly, and as Roosevelt came to see in the closing stages of World War II, an adequate conception of human freedom must extend from the political to the realms of the social and economic. In Obama's words, "it must encompass economic security and opportunity," freedom from want as well as freedom from fear, for "security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine and shelter they need to survive." Individual liberty, selfgovernment, and the rule of law are indispensable and insufficient. Like Roosevelt-and unlike every president since his death-Obama understands that liberal democracy reaches fruition only when all citizens possess the resources enabling them to exercise their rights. Whether he intends to work actively to extend that ambitious idea of freedom from the international to the domestic sphere is not yet clear.
Second, Obama called on the international community, as he has called on Americans, to keep in mind visionaries such as Gandhi and King even as he distanced himself from pacifism and insisted that force is sometimes tragically necessary. Gandhi's and King's strategies of nonresistance "may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance." Although Obama did not make the point, neither Gandhi nor King condemned war in all circumstances. One need not oppose all wars to doubt the necessity-or the wisdom of a particular war, as King did in the case of Vietnam and as Obama did in the case of Iraq, and as many of us Americans do in the case of Afghanistan. But, Obama continued, with reference to Gandhi and King, "the love they preached-their fundamental faith in human progress-must always be the North Star that guides us." It cannot be a blind faith, because we are too well aware of our limitations. But it should be a faith that inspires us to surpass what exists and to strive for what we believe should exist. In a passage that evoked sustained applause from his secular audience in Oslo, Obama wrapped up his speech in explicitly religious language: "Let us strive for the world that ought to be-that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls." Some commentators understood Obama's Nobel speech as a species of Niebuhr's Christian realism, others as a Deweyan pragmatist's chastened idealism. However it is interpreted, the speech provided Obama the chance to showcase for the world community the unusual combination of doubt and faith characteristic of his philosophical pragmatism and his own religious faith, a combination characteristically manifested in his writing.
Self-scrutiny of the sort that Obama showed in Oslo, in his speeches on politics and religion, and in his books remains rare in American public life. So is this striking admission in The Audacity of Hope: "I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute." Primarily for the reasons embedded in that arresting sentence, Obama finds himself, in his words, "left then with Lincoln." Obama's discussion of Lincoln reveals the reasons why he so often invokes the words of the sixteenth president, the one of his predecessors he most admires, and it reveals Obama's most profound political commitments. His account of Lincoln in The Audacity of Hope engages the controversies that have swirled around Lincoln's political career and his legacy ever since he emerged as a prominent national figure in the 1850s. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, Lincoln insisted that the question of allowing slavery in the territories should not be submitted to popular vote. His Illinois adversary Stephen A. Douglas invoked the principle of popular sovereignty to justify allowing the people of the territories to choose for themselves whether or not to permit the extension of slavery. In speeches stretching from his 1854 Peoria address through his election to the presidency in 1860, Lincoln stood firm against Douglas's interpretation of American democracy. It is true, as Lincoln's critics correctly observe, that during those years Lincoln never allied himself with abolitionists who insisted on the immediate end of slavery everywhere. Yet his characterizations of slavery as "a great moral wrong" nevertheless cost him crucial support in 1858, when whites in southern Illinois swung the legislature to select Douglas for the United States Senate. After the election of 1860, even though Lincoln deliberately muted his earlier criticism of slavery in an effort to prevent secession, it was the South's perception of the promise implicit in Lincoln's earlier denunciations of slavery that sparked the Civil War.
No one before or since, Obama writes, has understood as well as Lincoln "both the deliberative function of our democracy and the limits of such deliberation." Lincoln wrestled with competing impulses. On the one hand, he was convinced that slavery was an unmitigated evil. On the other, he knew that it would end only if Americans reached a common understanding about the need to eradicate it. The result of that struggle was Lincoln's tortured decision to go to war to preserve the Union. But throughout the war he insisted that the guilt for its necessity had to be shared, by both the South that had embraced slavery and the North that had allowed slavery to survive. The power of Lincoln's sublime second inaugural address de pends on that insistence. Less a declaration of victory than an act of contrition, it pledged the nation to redeem the bloody sacrifice of war by redeeming its promise of equality for all. Yet only a few years after Lincoln's death, northern and southern whites began stitching the nation back together with the doctrine of white supremacy.
Obama's paragraphs on Lincoln, among the most powerful in The Audacity of Hope, reveal an incisive understanding of both the advantages and the tragic disadvantages of democracy. Unless the commitment to majority rule is balanced against an equally firm commitment to realizing the ideals of individual liberty and social equality, democracy can produce indeed, it has produced horrible forms of injustice. Without an ethic of reciprocity that requires individuals to look beyond their own selfinterest and to sacrifice for the sake of the common good, any group of three can yield a majority of two committed to enslaving the minority of one. As Lincoln came to realize, weighing the evil of such injustice against the cost of ending it by waging war is the among most serious challenges a president can face. Obama has learned, from history and from his own experience, that deliberation can improve decision making. Multiplying perspectives can improve the odds of reaching a resolution that no individual might have seen. Yet the experience of Lincoln's generation also shows that not every decision can be put to a vote. Sometimes it is necessary to change the terms of the debate, as Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists did. Although formidable challenges of war, racism, and inequality remain in twenty-first-century America, moral clarity of the sort we now assign so easily to the issue of slavery is harder to find.
In Oslo Obama reaffirmed the principles of peace and justice he extolled in The Audacity of'Hope. In the international sphere the law of love must remain our guide. At home freedom means economic security and opportunity. But interpreting the implications of those principles provokes passionate disagreement. Americans on the left think that no war should be thought too big to end. They also think that every American who is willing to work should be regarded as too big to fail. Americans on the right believe that evil must be crushed at all costs and that the state must be restrained. Partisans on either side think only their own sharply honed principles can slice through such disagreements. But American history is more sobering. Obama's Christian humility, his pragmatist antifoundationalism, and his nuanced appreciation for the complexities of the American past all point toward the disconcerting but inescapable truth of human fallibility. The necessary war that ended slavery also ended half a million lives, after which the nation abandoned the slaves it had freed to a century-long ordeal. Obama understands that Lincoln's heroic convictions cannot be separated from the tragedies of the battlefield and the lynch mob. As the case of slavery shows, democratic compromise is not always possible. But Americans, including those who malign Obama's efforts to resolve rather than intensify conflict, should never forget the cost of its failure.
ARACK OBAMA UNDERSTANDS the limits of certainty and the limits of compromise. He knows that democratic politics is the art of the possible, in which results are achieved through persuasion and conciliation rather than force. He knows too that religion "insists on the impossible," and for that reason people of faith often bristle at compromise. But that conflict explains why, in a culture of many religions, preserving the separation of church and state remains as crucial now as it was when Jefferson and Madison first proposed the principle in their native Virginia. Obama's skepticism has limits: he declares that he is "absolutely sure" about "the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all its forms," and "the value of love and charity, humility and grace." But he admits that he is much less sure about the implications of those principles for particular political or legal issues. That uncertainty aligns him with Lincoln, James, Niebuhr, and contemporary American pragmatists such as Putnam and Bernstein, and it distinguishes him from Americans who believe that a bright line connects their moral commitments to their political judgments. Obama, like James and Niebuhr in particular, believes that some conflicts exact a tragic price. When values conflict, there is not always a resolution.
The most terrible example of such a conflict was the Civil War. At some level everyone now knows just as, to quote Lincoln's second inaugural address, everyone knew then-that slavery "was, somehow, the cause of the war." Obama's most sustained analysis of the still wrenching issue of race, of course, comes in his Dreams from My Father. Among the most compelling dimensions of his discussion, at least from my perspective as an American intellectual historian, is the imaginative way in which Obama deploys so many of the tropes of African American male writers but in new ways, and for his own purposes. Elements of slave narratives, especially the Narrative of'the Life of'Frederick Douglass, surface in Obama's account of the struggles that first his African father, then he himself, had to undergo as they made their ways in the different worlds of Africa, Asia, and the United States. But he knows neither of them was ever enslaved, so he is careful not to exaggerate the obstacles they faced. Elements of W. E. B. DuBois's seminal Souls of Black Folk surface both in Obama's discussions of his divided consciousness concerning race (DuBois's concept of double consciousness) and in his penetrating analysis of the tragic inevitability of slavery's poisonous legacy, the inherited prejudices and social practices that doomed radical Reconstruction.
Elements of the novels of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and especially Ralph Ellison, all of whom Obama reports having first read as an adolescent in Hawaii, surface in Obama's account of his wrestling to embrace his blackness and the resistance he encountered from others, and ultimately from himself, during his brief period of self-discovery as an angry young black man. As noted above, Obama's debts to Ellison run particularly deep. Many borrowed images from Invisible Man visibility and invisibility, blindness and sight, isolation and engagement, responsibility and destiny, madness as sanity, the traces of the past in the present, the dialectic of identity in recognition and anonymity, the magic of music and names, and of course the transformative power of public speaking pop up in passages in Dreams from My Father. Yet Obama acknowledges that no matter how attractive the pose of anger and alienation seemed to him as a young man, it was a poor fit, both because of his even-tempered personality and because of his very different circumstances. For all those reasons Invisible Man, with its desperate refusal to surrender, its determination to affirm the principle, and its resolutely indeterminate ending, left a particularly clear imprint on Obama's sensibility.
Elements of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., surface in Obama's attempt to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of militancy and mainstream political action and in his selfcritical and sometimes tragicomic account of his early missteps as a fledgling community organizer in Chicago. Yet he knows that he lives on the privileged other side of the civil rights movement, and that it opened doors for him to enjoy opportunities previously unavailable to African Americans, so he never allows himself to draw parallels between the struggles of earlier generations and those of his own. The question of Obama's debts to earlier African American writers, and his self-consciously delicate manipulation of his own doubled status as outside/insider, has already attracted scholars' attention. An adequate analysis of that theme will require a text longer than this one. Much as Obama has learned and drawn fromAfrican American intellectual traditions, he never confuses the challenges he faces, or those facing African Americans now, with those faced by his predecessors, particularly those who lived before emancipation but also those who lived before the legislation of the 1960s. Although I do not dispute the crucial influence of African American texts and traditions on Obama's ideas, I resist the suggestion, which I have heard repeatedly since I began this project, that all other influences pale in comparison. I think we should stop trying to differentiate the black from the white strands in American intellectual his tory. Obama's writings demonstrate conclusively that his ideas, like the ideas of all American thinkers worth studying, have been woven from many different sources.
Obama writes brilliantly and poignantly about the distinct phases of his life. As a boy in Indonesia, he possessed little consciousness of race. As a teenager in Hawaii, he attempted to escape into his blackness, but thanks to the example of his hip, mixed-race friend Ray and his grandfather's black friend Frank Davis, he found that he could not. As a college student, first at Occidental and then at Columbia, he tried to own or at least to come to terms with his blackness, but with equally inconclusive results. In Chicago, he sought to become part of a black community, but not until later, until he married Michelle Robinson, could he find a way to make that community his own.
Only when Obama traveled back to his father's native Kenya, before beginning Harvard Law School, did the peculiarity of his own life story at last come into focus. There he became entangled in the threads that tied him to his African ancestors as well as his Kansas grandparents, and that tied him to his own youth in Indonesia and Hawaii. But that enlightenment did not happen in the way he anticipated or in a way that I have encountered in the recounting of any other American odyssey.
Obama learned from his explorations that all cultural traditions now are always in a process of mutation. He discovered that if there is any really universal quality of human culture in our day, it is hodgepodge. In Nairobi or in the smallest villages of rural Kenya, as in Chicago or in the smallest towns of rural Illinois, Obama kept finding pieces of himself, not only pieces of his ancestry but also, and even more confoundingly, pieces of his present. Yet those pieces stubbornly refused to cohere into a unified pattern. Each of them was always in the process of becoming something else. Nothing remained stable. That knowledge, I think, is what he means in the closing pages of Dreams from My Father when he says his visit to Africa enabled him to close a circle. It's a circle of a particular kind, drawn at a particular historical moment, which deserves our attention.
When he was a child, Obama notes at the beginning of Dreams from My Father, his mother gave him a book called Origins. He describes himself puzzling over the different explanations offered by different cultures to explain how they began. Not surprisingly, perhaps inevitably, one of the stories is the Hindu tale of the world resting on the back of a turtle. Obama reports that he asked himself the question posed by Geertz's anthropologist. But at that age he was stumped, unable to come up with the answer that it's turtles all the way down. That knowledge came later, as Obama grew up while American culture was undergoing a profoundly unsettling transformation. Born in 1961, he came to consciousness with the foundations of American culture already under scrutiny, already unstable. He grew up with an absent African economist father he admired but barely knew and a present but spiritually wandering anthropologist mother, a seeker whom he loved, but whose romantic yearnings for the exotic eventually left him uneasy.
From his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, Obama learned about the similarities as well as the differences among cultures. She was trained as an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii. There her adviser was, coincidentally, Alice Dewey, the granddaughter of John Dewey. Soetoro was captivated by the cultures of Pakistan and Indonesia that also intrigued Geertz. After years of extensive fieldwork in local communities in Indonesia, she completed a 1,043-page doctoral dissertation entitled "Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving against the Odds." Dr. Soetoro challenged romantic leftist assumptions that Indonesian poverty resulted from the culture's predisposition against profit-making. She argued instead that it was the scarcity of capital, not aversion to capitalism, that had left rural Javanese communities unable to develop economically. She became active in early efforts to establish microcredit programs, and she criticized aid plans that distributed funds through government officials more interested in consolidating their authority and padding their bank accounts than jump-starting local enterprises. Dr. Soetoro learned from Alice Dewey, from the controversies surrounding Geertz's writings, and from her own experiences that acknowledging cultural differences need not mean projecting onto other people one's own preferences or aversions, ideals or illusions. Although his mother never tired of trying to convince Obama that he inherited a precious destiny from his father, only after her death did he come to realize, as he put it, that "she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her."
From his father Barack Obama, Sr., who left him and his mother when he was two, Obama learned different lessons. He learned about the lure of advanced degrees-his father disappeared from Hawaii to pursue graduate studies in economics and about the lure of Africa, where his father returned to work after he completed his graduate training. Except for that month-long visit to Hawaii when he was ten years old, his father never did return to see his first American wife and his son and namesake. Although Obama resented feeling abandoned, he long cherished an image of his father as the embodiment of a cosmopolitan ideal, a shimmering, glamorous, and successful black man who beat the odds. The chapter in Dreams from My Father in which Obama discusses his father's visit to Hawaii displays his self-awareness and the recesses of his ambivalence. The chapter closes with a vivid image of his father playing recordings of African music and teaching his young son to dance. "I took my first tentative steps with my eyes closed, down, up, my arms swinging, the voices lifting. And I hear him still: As I follow my father into the sound, he lets out a quick shout, bright and high, a shout that leaves much behind and reaches out for more, a shout that cries for laughter." If Obama abandoned his dream of becoming a writer of fiction, such sentences from his memoir show why he had reason to entertain that ambition.
Not until Obama traveled to Africa himself, after his father's death, did he learn the details of his father's life. He learned that his father had chosen to attend Harvard alone rather than accept another fellowship that would have enabled him to bring Obama and his mother with him to graduate school in New York City. Only then did Obama learn that because of his integrity, his stubbornness-or, more likely, some combination of both-his once-successful father had been harried out of public life in Kenya and had fallen into poverty, alcoholism, and obscurity. His father died in an automobile accident before he could fully recover from the loneliness and frustration he had endured. For much of his life, Obama came to realize, his father felt no more at home in his native Kenya than in Hawaii or Massachusetts. In Africa Obama encountered a sprawling constellation of family connections. If his American family had seemed less than complete, in Africa he found family everywhere. For the first time in his life, people not only recognized his name but knew his family. Yet his extensive explorations into his own background demonstrated the lack of cultural clarity that, as he learned, often frustrates African Americans who go looking for an Eden and find only a different fallen world, equally confused and confusing. All his ancestors, and now all his living relatives, from the oldest to the youngest, "were making it up as we went along." There was no map to consult; if it had ever existed, it had been "lost long ago." Contrasting sharply to Obama's consternation is the breezy self-assurance of his Stanford educated cousin Mark, who reports no sense of belonging in his native Kenya and no sense of loss, only "numbness," from his own African father's abandonment of his mother.
Obama's visit to his ancestral home of Alego, which the family calls "Home Squared," meaning home intensified, or "home twice-over," sparked his anticipation that he would find there, at last, the sense of wholeness, and of stable identity, that he had been seeking. Instead he found the same conflicts he had faced in America, squared. Conflicts between Kenyans from rival tribes. Conflicts between Christians and Muslims and animists. Conflicts between Africans and Asians and Europeans. Conflicts between Kenyans on schedules and those who considered schedules treason to family obligations. Conflicts between those who thought salvation lay in hard work and listless drifters with the same guarded, wounded eyes Obama had seen on the faces of Chicago gang members. Conflicts between women who demanded equality and those who found security, even comfort, in the old traditions of patriarchy and polygamy. "I'd come to Kenya thinking that I could somehow force my many worlds into a single, harmonious whole." Instead the divisions deepened; the differences only multiplied.
Obama found his own experience with conflicting cultural tendencies mirrored in Kenya. In Dreams from My Father, he recounts a conversation he had with a Kenyan historian, whom he calls Rukia Odero. Whether this exchange occurred or is one of Obama's creations, it yields arresting insights that demonstrate his supple understanding of the particularity as well as the historicity of culture. The historian told Obama that many of the visitors who come to Africa seeking "the authentic" return home disillusioned because the very idea of authenticity has become an illusion. For over a century all African cultures have been mixing old and new, not only African and European and Asian but also different and (initially if no longer) distinctive African tribal cultures. Odero's parting words to Obama confirm William James's original claim that American pragmatism is merely a new name for an old way of thinking, a disposition present in various thinkers and traditions since the ancient world. As Odero points out to him, Africans now confront a challenge quite different from colonialism: they must choose between competing traditions and between rival visions of the future. As her cultural analysis confirmed Obama's own maturing historicism and perspectivalism, so Odero's parting wisdom was that of a good philosophical pragmatist: "If you make the wrong choice," Odero concluded, "then you learn from your mistakes" and "see what works."
That approach to problem solving, rooted in experience and ever mutating in response to new problems, requires a willingness both to discard traditions that have become unhelpful and to continue taking instruction from those that remain vibrant and productive. Critics of philosophical pragmatism have charged from the beginning that pragmatists lack convictions because they refuse to embrace unchanging principles. To use Weber's typology, pragmatists have been accused of discarding the forms of traditional rationality and value rationality and relying exclusively on instrumental rationality. James's respect for individuals' choices about religion and Dewey's reverence for democratic participation both show the inaccuracy of that critique. So does Obama's appreciation for the tenacity with which individuals adhere to their cultural heritage, including not only religious faith but also other traditions that imbue their lives with meaning. Obama-like Odero, James, Dewey, Addams, DuBois, and Niebuhr, and like their predecessors Madison and Lincoln and their successors Rorty, Bernstein, and Putnam-demonstrates a nuanced understanding of the difference between sticking to dogmas regardless of the consequences and the flexibility to see when genuine loyalty to principles such as Christian love or democratic procedures requires making adjustments in their application to new realities. James's conception of an "open universe" shows his awareness that the world is ever changing. Obama's tenacious hope reflects his own awareness that such changes are not entirely beyond the reach of human direction, even though no individual in a democracy can dictate change.
In the address he delivered when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama borrowed the eloquent image used by Martin Luther King, Jr.: "Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice." But lasting reform occurs only slowly, and it can be consolidated only through patient and persistent persuasion, a willingness to admit mistakes, and a tireless commitment to taking one step at a time. A thoroughly democratic culture is not characterized, nor is democratic change achieved, by swaggering certainty but only by a deeper humility, the Christian virtue that reminds Obama that all humans on all sides of every controversy, including himself, are inevitably flawed. Democratic change requires a more enduring toughness than our impatient culture of the present, ever in search of quick fixes, is likely either to recognize or respect. In the preface to the second edition of Dreams, Obama contrasted those who seek "a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us," those whose dogmatism undermines democratic deliberation, against those who "embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together." Along with freedom and equality, those democratic values include a steadfast willingness to tolerate differences and a commitment to the fruitfulness of compromise.
Indonesia and Hawaii. Occidental and Columbia. The far south side of Chicago and the villages of rural Kenya. The law schools of Harvard and the University of Chicago. The Illinois state legislature and the practice of civil rights law. Why should we choose among these options as we try to make sense of Obama's development? As his books make clear, his experiences wrestling with all these diverse cultures and institutions shaped his sensibility. His multiple commitments-to grass-roots organizing, churchbased social networks of Christian activists, law conceived as an instrument of democratic deliberation and community building, James's and Dewey's pragmatist philosophy, economic populism, and the resolution shared by Ellison, King, and Malcolm X to affirm the principle in the face of racism-may seem incompatible to some people today. Yet I see no reason why they should prove any more inconsistent now than they were decades ago, when numerous and influential progressive reformers shared just such experiences, ideas, and aspirations and effected important if incomplete change.
Obama learned throughout his life, first from his own parents and grandparents, from his reading and research guided by professors in some of America's leading universities, from his own experiences as a community organizer, and as a visitor to his extended family in Kenya, that cultures are dynamic. The values people cherish do not descend from the sky but emerge from their past and their present, and they must adapt those values creatively to solve the problems they encounter in the future.
Although it is customary in American academic life to contrast the importance of community to the importance of the individual, Obama's writing and his political career make clear that the contrast is overdrawn in his case. His democratic commitment to the importance of community was forged by his own feelings of isolation as a youth, by the anger and violence of Chicago's gangs, by the lure of St. Catherine's and Wright's Trinity congregation, and by his exposure to the debates over historicism, particu larism, civic republicanism, democratic deliberation, and civil society that he encountered as a student and as a member of the Saguaro seminars. His equally firm commitment to equal rights stems from admiring his ambitious father's rise and from understanding that oppression can wear the mask of a benign but stultifying paternalism. Both intellectually and politically, Obama has amalgamated American traditions usually-but incorrectly thought to be distinct. He has learned congruent lessons from multiple sources. Democracy works best when rights are balanced against responsibilities. Democracy requires compromise, not because it is the path of least resistance but because people can learn from each other, and because lasting change demands widespread popular assent. Change in a democracy is a work of decades, not months or even years. Obama also learned, from absorbing all these lessons, that a culture's only home is to be found in its often tortured history.
Thus it was Africa's baobab trees, with their odd, almost cartoonish shapes and their unpredictable patterns of dormancy and flowering, that provided Obama with the peculiar image of rootedness he needed-or at least the only one available to him. "They both disturbed and comforted me," he writes near the end of his memoir, "those trees that looked as if they might uproot themselves and simply walk away, were it not for the knowledge that on this earth one place is not so different from another-the knowledge that one moment carries within it all that's gone on before." That provocative image, and Obama's realization that the present carries the past within itself, brings me to my conclusion.
Barack Obama embodies a surprising number of the central themes in the American political tradition, particularly as it has come to be understood in the last half century. But he does not-he cannot neatly reconcile all the diverse strands of the American past or the American present. As he knows, democracy thrives on difference, even as it must try to resolve disagreements, at least provisionally, through empathy, deliberation, and experimentation. Equipped with an understanding of the multiple dimensions and the dynamic history of American social and political thought and practice, Americans should be able to hear in Obama's words many echoes from the American past, both its origins and its recent decades of intellectual and cultural upheaval. Obama embraces a version of American political ideals, more egalitarian in its goals and more moderate in its means, that has fallen from favor in recent decades, as both parties have become more partisan, and as shouted invective has replaced respectful disagreements. Americans who prefer their principles stated with dogmatic certainty rather than with the humility and tentativeness appropriate for democratic deliberation might find Obama's conception of politics unpalatable. In part for that reason, and in part because he flavors his universalist aspirations with healthy doses of historicism and pragmatism still unfamiliar to large segments of the culture, many Americans have not noticed how firmly Obama is rooted in older national political traditions. Even so, if we pay careful attention to those echoes from our democratic past, we should be able to hear reverberating "the enduring power of our ideals," the force that the newly elected president invoked on the night the campaign ended. The meanings of those ideals, however, are complex, contested, and changing. They are not now, and they never have been, simple, self-evident, and fixed. Obama understands that the power of our principles of liberty and equality depends not on the fervor with which they are proclaimed but on the deliberative process from which they have developed. That process requires us to debate, test, and revise the meaning of our ideals in practice rather than genuflecting reverentially before them. Only when we affirm the process of continuous and open-ended experimentation do we affirm the principle of democracy.
EADERS INTERESTED IN PURSUING the issues discussed in this book will find suggestions in the pages that follow. Almost all the quotations in the text come from the writings and speeches of Barack Obama, which are readily accessible. My interpretations of American history in general, and of late twentiethcentury American culture in particular, derive from sources that I have arranged here according to the order in which specific questions are addressed in Reading Obama.
This study began with my reading of Obama's own books, which remain the best point of entry for understanding his ideas. In addition to Dreams from My Father. A Story of'Race and Inheritance, 2nd ed. (1995; New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004); The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Random House, 2006); and Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama's Plan to Renew America's Promise (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008), readers interested in Obama's ideas should consult The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union," ed. T. Denean Sharpley- Whiting (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), which includes his March 18, 2008, Philadelphia speech on the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The other major speeches by Obama discussed in the text, including his June 28, 2006, speech in Washington, D.C., before Jim Wallis's Sojourners' conference "Building a Covenant for a New America"; his November 4, 2008, acceptance speech in Chicago the night of the election; his January 20, 2009, inaugural address; his June 4, 2009, speech to the Islamic World in Cairo; his December 1, 2009, speech on Afghanistan at West Point; and his December 9, 2009, Nobel acceptance speech in Oslo, are easily accessible on the Internet. Obama's article "Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City," originally published in Illinois Issues, September, 1988, pp. 27-29, was reprinted in After Alinsky: Organizing in the 1990s, ed. Peg Knoepfle (Springfield, IL: Sangamon State University, 1990), pp. 35-40. The syllabus for Obama's seminar on race and the law, offered at the University of Chicago Law School in the spring term of 1994, was put on the New York Times website on July 30, 2008. A condensed version of the dissertation written by Obama's mother has been published: Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, ed. Alice G. Dewey et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
Readers interested in more detailed elaboration of my arguments concerning philosophical pragmatism, progressive reform, civic republicanism, deliberative democracy, civil society, communitarianism, individual thinkers such as William James, John Dewey, Max Weber, Jurgen Habermas, and Richard Rorty, and the relation between these issues and the history of American democracy from the seventeenth century to the present should consult James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Kloppenberg, The Intellectual Origins of'Democracy in Europe and America (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Among the many biographies and specialized studies of Obama that have already been published, the most detailed is David Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (New York: Knopf, 2010). David Plouffe, The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory (New York: Viking, 2009), provides his campaign manager's perspective. Gwen Ifill, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama (New York: Anchor Books, 2009); Peniel E. Joseph, Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama (Philadelphia: Basic Civitas, 2010); and Kareem Crayton, "'You May Not Get There with Me': Obama and the Black Establishment," in Barack Obama and African American Empowerment: The Rise of Black America's New Leadership, ed. Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 195-208, illuminate the role of race in Obama's rise to prominence. Thomas J. Sugrue, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of'Race (Princeton: Princeton Uni versity Press, 2010), emphasizes the radical dimension of the civil rights movement and the persistence of racism in contemporary America.
On Frank Marshall Davis, the poet whom Obama credits for helping him understand black life in white America, see Frank Marshall Davis, Livin' the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). On Frantz Fanon's classic Wretched of'the Earth and Fanon's influence, see Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis R. Gordon et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). For insight into Obama's guide to American and European history and philosophy while an undergraduate at Occidental, see Roger Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of'Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); and Boesche, Tocqueville's Road Map (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006). For an overview of the scholarly literature on Tocqueville, see Kloppenberg, "The Canvas and the Color: Tocqueville's 'Philosophical History' and Why It Matters Now," Modern Intellectual History 3, 3 (2006): 495-521.
On the ideas and continuing influence of the American philosopher William James, see Kloppenberg, "James's Pragmatism and American Culture, 1907-2007," in 100 Years of Pragmatism: William James's Revolutionary Philosophy, ed. John Stuhr (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). On John Dewey, see Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Westbrook, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of'Truth (Ithaca: Cornell Uni versity Press, 2005); and Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1995).
The scholarly literature on African American thought is growing rapidly; a fine collection of recent essays is Adolf Reed, Jr., and Kenneth W. Warren, eds., Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of'African American Thought (Boulder: Paradigm, 2010). Reed has been one of Obama's severest critics. In "The Curse of Community," Village Voice, January 16, 1996, he dismissed Obama as part of "the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics." On Ellison and Invisible Man, see Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2007); and the diverse perspectives available in The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison, ed. Ross Posnock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to "Invisible Man, " ed. Lucas Morel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004); and Kenneth W. Warren, So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
On the relation between community organizing and the labor movement, see Saul D. Alinsky, John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1949). The classic manifesto is Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radi cals (New York: Random House, 1971); see also Sanford D. Horwit, Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky-His Life and Legacy (New York: Knopf, 1989). The most widely read of Howard Zinn's many books is A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present, rev. ed. (1980; New York: Perennial, 2005). In his essay "Why Organize," Obama emphasized the work of William Julius Wilson, whose controversial books include The Declining Significance of'Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); and When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Random House, 1996). For detailed analysis of Wilson and Obama, see Sugrue, Not Even Past, pp. 70-85. For the perspective on organizing that helped shape Obama's perspective while he was in Chicago, see John L. McKnight, The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
The best guide to the ideas shaping legal education at the time Obama was at Harvard Law School is the splendid study by Laura Kalman, The Strange Career of'Legal Liberalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). See also Richard D. Kahlenberg, Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992); and Kenneth Mack, "Barack Obama before He Was a Rising Political Star," Journal of'Blacks in Higher Education 45 (2004): 98-101, which describes Mack's and Obama's path through Harvard Law School. For concise overviews of contentious developments written in the early 1990s by members of the Harvard Law School com munity, see the articles by William W. Fisher III, "Critical Legal Studies," Anthony Cook, "Critical Race Theory," Joan Williams, "Feminist Jurisprudence," and William W. Fisher III, "Law and Economics," in A Companion to American Thought, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 151-56, 235-37, and 390-91. For further discussion of these issues, including particularly the relation between philosophical pragmatism and the rise of legal realism, see Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of the American Law, 1870-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Kloppenberg, "The Theory and Practice of Legal History," Harvard Law Review 106, 6 (April 1993): 133251; and Kloppenberg, "Deliberative Democracy and Judicial Supremacy: A Review of Robert A. Burt, The Constitution in Conflict and Cass R. Sunstein, The Partial Constitution," Law and History Review 13 (1995): 393411.
The rise, impact, and transformation of civic republicanism is a central theme in Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of'the American Republic, 1776-1787, originally published in 1969, attracted enormous attention and sparked scholarly controversies that persist into the present. Wood addressed his critics in a preface to the second edition of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and in many of the essays collected in Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (New York: Penguin, 2006). Wood's other major works include The Radicalism of'the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992); and The Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 17891815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), both of which underscore the long-term democratic consequences of the revolution. Recent accounts interpreting the American Revolution as a popular uprising and the Constitution as a betrayal of the people include Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Viking, 2005); Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); and Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy: "The People," the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of'the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
On the influence of the Chicago traditions of democracy and pragmatism, a spirited and provocative (if perhaps overstated) article is Bart Schultz, "Obama's Political Philosophy: Pragmatism, Politics, and the University of Chicago," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 39 (2009): 127-73. Tracing a related tradition more explicitly back to Lincoln is Susan Schulten, "Barack Obama, Abraham Lincoln, and John Dewey," Denver University Law Review 86 (2009): 807-18. Robert Putnam expanded the argument from his influential article into a book with the same title, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). The classic statement of the communitarian perspective was Robert Bellah et al., Habits of'the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). On deliberative democracy, the central text is Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).
For the shift in American culture away from varieties of universalism toward varieties of particularism, the best source is Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), which provides a comprehensive analysis of the multidimensional transformation I discuss in chapter 2. Other overviews of American thought during these crucial years include Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); and on the political repercussions, Liberalism for a New Century, ed. Neil Jumonville and Kevin Mattson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Rightward Bound, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
For John Rawls, in addition to A Theory of'Justice and Political Liberalism, readers should consult Rawls, Collected Papers, ed Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), which includes papers published from 1955 through the 1990s, including the preface to the French edition of A Theory of'Justice and Rawls's illuminating 1998 interview published in Commonweal. Also of interest is Rawls, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: With "On My Religion" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), a volume including Rawls's 1942 Princeton thesis, his 1997 essay on his changing attitudes toward religion, and commentaries by Thomas Nagel, Joshua Cohen, and Robert Merrihew Adams. Valuable studies of Rawls include Thomas Pogge and Michelle Kosch, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of'Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Percy B. Lehning, John Rawls: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For discussion of Max Weber's ideas of rationality and political action in relation to philosophical pragmatism, see Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, pp. 321-415; and Kloppenberg, Virtues of Liberalism, pp. 82-99.
Michael Sandel has published, in addition to Liberalism and the Limits of Justice and Democracy's Discontent, a book based on his popular undergraduate course at Harvard, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009). For a sample of feminist responses to Rawls published in the late 1980s and early 1990s, see Susan Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self. Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992). On the lure of Habermas during these years, see The Communicative Ethics Controversy, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Fred Dallmayr (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), and Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). Collections offering perspectives on these issues from multiple viewpoints are Liberalism and Its Critics, ed. Michael Sandel (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); and Pragmatism and Feminism, ed. Cass R. Sunstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
For more detailed accounts of a process schematized in my presentation here, the multidimensional transformation of academic disciplines and American culture in the middle of the twentieth century, see American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines, ed. Thomas Bender and Carl Schorske (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7, The Modern Social Sciences, ed. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II, ed. David A. Hollinger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); David A. Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of'Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Richard Tuck, Free Riding (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World. America's Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); and Wendy L. Wall, Inventing "The American Way": The Politics of'Con- sensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
On Reinhold Niebuhr, see Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1985); on Thomas J. Kuhn, see Alexander Bird, Thomas Kuhn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and on Clifford Geertz, see Fred Inglis, Clifford Geertz: Culture, Custom and Ethics (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2000). For the resurgence of pragmatism in American thought, see Kloppenberg, "Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?" in The Revival of Pragmatism, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 83-127, a comprehensive collection that includes essays by Rorty, Bernstein, Putnam, and many of the other contributors to the pragmatist revival that has continued into the present. Recent examples include Hilary Putnam, Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); and a splendid reference work, A Companion to Pragmatism, ed. John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009).
On the United States Constitution, a judicious and accessible recent study is Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2005). James Madison, Writings (New York, Library of America, 1999), provides an excellent introduction to the writ ings of the most important figure in the framing and ratification of the Constitution. Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), remains unsurpassed on Madison's ideas. On the impossibility of identifying a unitary and unchanging meaning in the Constitution, see, in addition to Sunstein's Partial Constitution and Tribe and Dorf's On Reading the Constitution, the fuller account in Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of'the Constitution (New York: Knopf, 1996). The classic essay by Marvin Meyers is "Reflection and Choice: Beyond the Sum of the Differences," in The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison, ed. Marvin Meyers (1973; Hanover: University Press of New England, 1981), pp. xi-xlix. For up-to-date guidance into the founding documents themselves, see The Annotated U. S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, ed. Jack N. Rakove (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). On representative democracy more generally, see Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
On the relation between the idea of ordered liberty and democracy in early America, see J. S. Maloy, The Colonial Origins of'Modern Democratic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Kloppenberg, "Tocqueville, Mill, and the American Gentry," in the bicentennial issue of La Revue TocquevillelThe Tocqueville Review 27, 2 (2006): 351-80. The February 24, 1819 letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson is in The Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 534-35. On the demise of the 1950s-era concept of American consensus, see Kloppenberg, "Requiescat in Pacem: The Liberal Tradition of Louis Hartz," in The American Liberal Tradition Reconsidered. The Contested Legacy of Louis Hartz, ed. Mark Hulliung (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010). A two-volume study of Jane Addams that captures the democratic sensibility of Chicago progressives is Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle fir Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Knight, Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (New York: Norton, 2010). On notable progressives, see Trygve Thront- veit, "'Common Counsel': Woodrow Wilson's Pragmatic Progressivism, 1885-1913," in Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson, ed. John Milton Cooper, Jr. (Washington D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008); John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2009); and Melvin I. Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis. A Life (New York: Pantheon, 2009).
On the New Deal, compare the classic accounts of Carl N. Degler, Out of'Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America, 3rd ed. (1959; New York: Harper and Row, 1984); and William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963); with David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 19291945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Cass R. Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
On the traditions that Jeremiah Wright inherited, see Ralph Luker, The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885-1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); and Fred C. Harris, Something Within: Religion in African American Political Activism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). On Wright himself, see What Makes You So Strong? Sermons of Joy and Strength by Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., ed. Jini Gilgore Ross (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1993); and on his church, Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., The Sankofa Moment: The History of'Trinity United Church of Christ (Dallas: St. Paul Press, 2010). On the increasing diversity of contemporary American religious practices and the consequences of that diversity for political engagement, see Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Is Reshaping Our Civic and Political Lives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
On the shift in American politics from the New Deal to the Reagan revolution, see The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, ed. Steve Fraser and Gery Gerstle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); and an influential collection of essays interrogating the shift from egalitarian to individualist assumptions, Beyond Self=Interest, ed. Jane Mansbridge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Tracing the tradition of cooperation between radicals and moderate liberals that has only recently and, for the Left, disastrously been severed is Doug Rossinow, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
The seminal assessment of the evidence of increasing economic inequality in the United States since the 1970s is Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, "Income Inequality in the United States," Quarterly Journal of'Economics 118, 1 (2003): 1-39. Updated versions of their data, the most recent of which run through 2007, are available at their website at the University of California, Berkeley: http:// elsa.berkeley.edu/-saez/. See also the essays in Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Know, ed. Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol (New York: Russell Sage, 2005); and Benjamin I. Page and Lawrence R. Jacobs, Class War? What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
On the civil rights movement and its consequences, see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," Journal of American History 91, 4 (2005): 1233-63, which provides an excellent guide to the scholarly literature; James R. Ralph, Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of'Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); and Taylor Branch, America in the King Years, 3 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999-2006), a popular account that Obama told a friend he recognized as his own story. On the transnational dimensions of the civil rights movement, see Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Nico Slate, Reflections of Freedom: Race, Caste, and the Long Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
On the agreements masked by the idea of a "culture war," see E. J. Dionne, Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991); Alan Wolfe, One Nation, After All (New York: Viking, 1998); Morris P. Fiorina, Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture War? The Myth of'a Polarized America, 3rd ed. (Boston: Longman, 2010); and the related issues addressed in Page and Jacobs, Class War?
On pragmatism and feminism, see Joan C. Williams, Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do about It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Joan C. Williams, Reshaping the Work Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke (New York: Basic Books, 2003); and Feminism and Political Theory, ed. Cass Sunstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Many recent works probe the changing contours of race and ethnicity in America. See in particular David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Eddie S. Glaude Jr., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of'Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Pragmatism and the Problem of Race, ed. Bill E. Lawson and Donald F. Koch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); and Jose Medina, "James on Truth and Solidarity: The Epistemology of Diversity and the Politics of Specificity," in 100 Years of Pragmatism, pp. 124-43.
Of the countless books on Lincoln and slavery, see Richard J. Carwadine, Lincoln (London: Pearson, 2003); John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York: Twelve, 2008); and Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010). On the tragic aftermath of the Civil War and the abandonment of newly freed African Americans, see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001).
For thoughtful reflections on the first year of Obama's presidency, see the essays by Danielle Allen, William Galston, Martha Nussbaum, Katha Pollitt, Robert Reich, Michael Sandel, and Michael Walzer in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas (Spring 2010). For assessments of the causes of the nation's economic collapse prior to the presidential election of 2008 and the dangers to democracy in continuing down the path taken by the Obama administration in its early stages, see Joseph E. Stiglitz, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (New York: Norton, 2010); and Robert Kutt- ner, A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama's Promise, Wall Street's Power, and the Struggle to Control Our Economic Future (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2010).
HAVE PILED UP A LOT OF DEBTS while writing this little book. I am grateful to Tony Badger, Duncan Bell, Duncan Kelly, Dan Matlin, Michael O'Brien, Andrew Preston, and John A. Thompson, who welcomed me as Pitt Professor into the community of American historians at the University of Cambridge and arranged for me to deliver the lectures on American political thought that prompted me to think about locating Barack Obama in American intellectual history. While I was in Cambridge, Quentin Skinner and Susan James generously allowed me to live in their home, a kindness that cannot be repaid. In other ways the fellows and students of Jesus College likewise made me feel very much at home. I am grateful for their hospitality to the Master of Jesus, Robert Mair; President James Clackson; Veronique Mottier, who arranged for me to discuss Obama with students at Jesus; Rosalind Crone and Rebecca Flemming, with whom I had many delightful conversations; John B. Thompson, who first suggested that I transform my paper on Obama into a book; and especially Michael O'Brien and Duncan Kelly, generous hosts, guides, and interlocutors. To members of the extraordinary Cambridge faculties of Social and Political Studies, English, and History, particularly Stefan Collini, John Dunn, Geoffrey Hawthorne, Raymond Geuss, Istvan Hont, Charles Jones, Gareth Stedman Jones, Melissa Lane, Peter Mandler, Ruth Scurr, Michael Sonenscher, and Adam Tooze, I am grateful for having had the chance to eat, drink, and talk about ideas. I owe special debts to Anouch Bourmayan, Sophie King, Joy Labern, Sarah Mortimer, Sophus Reinert, and Francesca Viano for kindnesses large and small during my year in Cambridge.
Not only did President James Wright of Dartmouth College invite me to discuss Obama at a symposium in the fall of 2008, he gave me my first chance, as a Dartmouth undergraduate thirty years ago, to do independent research, and he waited patiently for the result while I spent months in Washington, D.C., fruitlessly organizing against the Vietnam War. I am glad to be able to thank him for both opportunities. I learned from all my fellow discussants at Dartmouth, including Leah Daughtry, Annette Gordon-Reed, Rob Portman, David Shribman, and Jacques Steinberg. Many other people generously invited me to discuss Obama in the past two years. I journeyed twice to Oxford, once at the invitation of Marc Stears and once at the invitation of Richard Carwadine. Although Jim Livesey and Knud Haakonsen at Sussex asked me to address their faculty on the subject of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, James Madison, and James Wilson instead of Obama, my informal conversations about American poli tics in Sussex were very illuminating. Dan Scroop and Mike Braddick at Sheffield rounded up a large and engaging crowd full of questions about Obama, as did Richard Crockatt and Nick Selby at East Anglia, Richard King and Robin Vendome at Nottingham, and Joel Isaac at the London Institute for Historical Research. Maurizio Vaudagna arranged two memorable gatherings of students and citizens in Torino, Italy. Hans Joas and Emanuel Richter allowed me to present my argument on Obama at a conference of distinguished Dewey scholars, including Robert B. Westbrook and Richard J. Bernstein, at the Zentrum fur interdisziphare Forschung in Bielefeld, Germany. David Hollinger, Annette Gordon-Reed, and David Garrow provided insightful commentary at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in San Diego. Peter Buttigieg, Sabeel Rahman, Ganesh Sitara- man, Previn Warren, and Tom Wolfe invited me to discuss Obama at a meeting of the Democratic Renaissance Project, a lively group of politically active young men and women that has restored my hope for the future of American democracy. Finally, the students who attended my lectures in Cambridge and the students enrolled in my undergraduate and graduate courses at Harvard in 20092010 have pushed me hard, again and again, to clarify my arguments about Obama and American democracy. To all these colleagues and students I am grateful.
Friends and former teachers of Barack Obama have been unfailingly helpful. Among the many people who agreed to speak with me, I am particularly indebted to Michael Baron, Roger Boesche, Michael Dorf, Bob Gannett, Mike Kruglick, Ken Mack, Martha Minow, Michael Sandel, Laurence Tribe, and Roberto Unger for insights that would have been unavailable otherwise. Other friends have helped me clarify my ideas through conversation, answering questions, or making helpful-and sometimes sharply critical suggestions, including David Armitage, Thomas Bender, Vincent Brown, Angus Burgin, Charles Capper, Lizabeth Cohen, Kareem Crayton, Carl Degler, Carrie Elkins, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Katharine Gerb- ner, Pierre Gervais, Glenda Goodman, Jonathan Hansen, Joan Hollinger, Morton Horwitz, Meg Jacobs, Walter Johnson, Jane Kamensky, Michael Kazin, David M. Kennedy, Andrew Kinney, Amy Kittelstrom, Kathleen McGovern, Elizabeth More, Darra Mulderry, Alice O'Connor, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Sam Rosenfeld, Emma Rothschild, Manisha Sinha, Rachel St. John, Thomas Sugrue, Francois Weil, Cornel West, Robert Westbrook, Daniel Wewers, Ann Wilson, and Julian Zelizer.
A number of people read early versions of the book manuscript and gave me the benefit of their responses, including Sandy Baum, Richard J. Bernstein, Richard Fox, Peter Gordon, Annette Gordon-Reed, Bryan Hehir, Mike Kruglik, Zach Liscow, Michael McPherson, Martha Minow, Timothy Peltason, Robert Putnam, Michael Sandel, Nico Slate, Trygve Throntveit, and Laurence Tribe. Although David Garrow is working on his own biography of Obama, and although he does not share my interest in the importance of ideas in Obama's life, he generously shared with me his research, his contacts, and his judgment. Daniel T. Rodgers, who had just finished writing his superb book Age of Fracture, which examines in detail many of the issues addressed in my book, generously read the manuscript for Princeton University Press; his judgment and his expertise greatly improved the book. David A. Hollinger, who had already talked through my arguments with me in England and worked through two earlier drafts, making valuable suggestions each time, nevertheless read the final draft with his characteristic thoroughness and acuity, thereby earning a triple dose of gratitude.
Scholars at different stages of their careers helped with the final stages of preparing the manuscript for publication. At a crucial moment, my friend Darra Mulderry offered her characteristically acute historian's insight, and Arjun Ramamurti's attention to detail saved me from a number of errors. Noah Rosenblum not only prepared the index with intelligence and care, his probing queries about passages in the text helped me clarify important arguments.
Working with Princeton University Press has been smooth and satisfying. From the start Brigitta van Rheinberg and Peter Dougherty shared my hopes for the book, and Brigitta's enthusiasm has grown along with the man uscript. Everyone involved in the design, editing, and production of the book, particularly Ellen Foos, Anita O'Brien, and Sarah Wolf, has shown the consideration and professionalism that all authors prize.
Finally, as always, my deepest debts are to my family. My wife Mary Cairns Kloppenberg, no matter how overburdened with her own work, is the only person I can trust to read a first draft and a final draft. From start to finish, her insistence on clarity and her kindness never waver. Our children Annie Kloppenberg and Jay Kloppenberg also read drafts; they offered not only encouragement but among the most detailed and discerning, and the most blunt, critiques I received. After licking my wounds only briefly, I realized their ideas improved the book, and I realized how happy I am that they have grown into adults with sharp critical judgment and equally strong convictions.
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