Theory v. Praxis

Asked once his thoughts on pragmatism, the late Columbia University professor Sidney Morgenbesser is said to have replied: “It’s all very well in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice.”

Like a bad party guest, that last retort wouldn’t leave the mental premises as I made my way through Harvard history professor James T. Kloppenberg’s new book “Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition.” Released Sunday, “Reading Obama” is a highly sympathetic account of Obama’s intellectual influences, designed to establish him as no less than “the most penetrating political thinker elected to the presidency in the past century.” But the grab bag of thinkers and ideological positions presented make trying to pin an intellectual label on Obama—like Kloppenberg’s preferred phrase “philosophical pragmatism”—a strained enterprise. Obama may be a shrewd politician, with both a moral vision and knack for the give-and-take required of Oval Office negotiations, but calling him a pragmatist doesn’t make understanding his decisions any easier. In fact, it may actually paper over inconsistencies—both in his own views and in those of pragmatism itself.

For starters, there’s something deeply odd about the book’s emphasis on an “intellectual” account of Obama’s philosophy, excised from his actual career—not only because Obama is a working politician long past kibbutzing about Peirce and Dewey in Langell Hall, but because pragmatism itself rejects the line between theory and application. (A peculiar note in the acknowledgements thanks a historian colleague “working on his own biography of Obama, although he does not share my interest in the importance of ideas in Obama’s life.”) That oddity points to the knottier issue of Kloppenberg’s distinction between “philosophical” and “vulgar” pragmatism. It is a distinction which, as he admits in the book’s introduction, is “not always clear in practice because philosophical pragmatists can and sometimes do recommend what seems simply practical.” But, he says, “I will insist on the difference.” Surely this begs the question—for it is precisely this element of decisionism in pragmatism, the seemingly arbitrary moment that those in power “insist on the difference,” that is itself at stake.

Essential to the mild civic debate Kloppenberg advocates is that no citizen’s view be too strongly argued. Indeed, what Kloppenberg seems to want is disagreement—but not too much. He is against anything that threatens to disrupt what he variously calls “civility” and “comity”—repeatedly dismissing journalists’  “sensation-driven coverage,” which he claims distracts from the “careful scrutiny” Obama’s books deserve; and Nietzsche’s radical perspectivism, which in each of the book’s multiple references becomes a synonym for “valueless, post-Christian nihilism,” and “ensnaring” despair.

The fact that America is actually capable of sustaining these mild disagreements may be because its values are relatively homogeneous. (Tocqueville noted this with some surprise in his travels of America in 1831; modern surveys confirm.) But take Germany, where a major recent upswing in anti-immigrant sentiment threatens to boil over precisely because as an issue it defies consensus. According to a recent poll, one third of Germans want foreigners repatriated; 10 percent of Germans advocate not just a strong leader but a “führer” (a word used in the country today only with reference to Hitler). This month Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that multiculturalism in her country had “utterly failed.” The left’s response trickled forth a few weeks later from liberal darling Jürgen Habermas. Three pages where one would do, discoursing obliquely toward a solution that never quite arrives, the piece terminates abruptly in a three-sentence conclusion: “The United States has a president with a clear-headed political vision, even if he is embattled and now meets with mixed feelings. What is needed in Europe is a revitalized political class that overcomes its own defeatism with a bit more perspective, resoluteness and cooperative spirit. Democracy depends on the belief of the people that there is some scope left for collectively shaping a challenging future.”

The problem with the idea of democracy as a testing ground for “collectively shaping” ideas, however, is that at times values might conflict irreconcilably—or arrive at the “wrong” conclusions. Consensus is itself an empty category; the tragedy of democracy is that it is not always just. If most Germans agreed that Turks and Arabs should be ousted from their country immediately, this would not make it more acceptable. As Obama himself makes no pretense of hiding (writing in “The Audacity of Hope” that “I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty—for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute”) there are certain times when a leader’s rigidly held beliefs may override citizens’. Kloppenberg himself cites the “heroic convictions” of Lincoln’s stance against slavery as an example. But if the philosophy of pragmatism really does require an option to override consensus, its coherence as a doctrine must be questioned.

Perhaps the most troubling line in Kloppenberg’s book comes at the end of the first chapter, when he starkly states: “America in the early twenty-first century has enemies.” He means enemies abroad; that this is taken for granted, in such unequivocal language, sends warning signals. Indeed, the civic tolerance he has Obama advocating seems to break down when it comes to foreign relations. In one of the few critical notes in the book, he writes that: “The strident tone of his inaugural address and startling speed and extent of his expansion of the American military’s role in Afghanistan suggest [that] in the sphere of international relations, Obama may prove no more successful in using philosophical pragmatism to harness his ambitions than Woodrow Wilson.”

So we’re left with this coy evasion: Is he, or isn’t he? Either Obama is not always a philosophical pragmatist, or philosophical pragmatism might not actually be effective—neither of which Kloppenberg wishes to concede. (The link between Obama’s “ambitions” and his pragmatism remains tantalizingly undeveloped.) Times are hard, ideas are soft—averse to absolutes, philosophical pragmatism may come to mean simply whatever it means when implemented. What’s certain is that as considered here it is too broad, and leaves too many questions unanswered, to serve as a satisfactory political theory. After all, if one weren’t already on board with Obama’s actions in office thus far, how would one really feel about a “pragmatist” in the White House?

Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a former Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House.