Obama's Pragmatism

 Note: This is a preliminary sketch.  Maybe if you cock your head and squint your eye you can see what I see. The bold faced words mark for me where I am to put explanatory links.  The ellipses where I am to spell things out.  Most everything so marked needs to be developed.  So this is not just a sketch and preliminary at that; it is very preliminary.  I post it in the hope that it will elicit reactions that will spur its development.

Michael Eldridge

10 July 2009

For those who know intellectual pragmatism well, particularly the social pragmatism identified by James Campbell, Obama’s pragmatism is clearly recognizable.  It is marked by historicism, meliorism, and value-shaped effectiveness or strategic idealism.  In short Obama practices the social intelligence recommended by John Dewey.  He believes our practices are revisable and can be re-shaped through deliberation (read: democracy) and experimentation to enable us to live well.  It is not necessary that Obama knows this intellectual movement and considers himself to be a part of it.  It is sufficient that he practices what they recommended.  He exemplifies the pragmatism they articulated and defended.  By placing Obama in this context we are able to make use of the resources of this tradition to explain and justify his practice.  Some of these charges are that his pragmatism is a matter of mere expediency or that he is anti-ideological and thus devoid of principle.

But this approach—having something in mind then finding it—is epistemically suspect.  Perhaps we students of pragmatism are projecting this on to Obama.

We do have two checks on ourselves—Obama’s use of the term . . . .

 . . . . and his intellectual heritage: His mother’s Ph.D. advisor was Alice Dewey, granddaughter of John Dewey, and the influence on Alinsky by the pragmatically oriented University of Chicago Sociology Department.  Note that Lawrence J. Engel has established the influence of the pragmatic sociology department of the University of Chicago on Alinsky ["Saul D. Alinsky and the Chicago School," The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 16.1 (2002): 50-66].  And the influence of Alinsky on Obama is well documented in Dreams from My Father and Ryan Lizza, "The Agitator; Barack Obama's Unlikely Political Education," The New Republic (19 March 2007).  Now we just  need to check to see if the nature of this continuity from Dewey and Mead to Obama is significantly pragmatic. . . .

But there is still another objection.  Elvin Lim suggests that most politicians, as well as others, are pragmatic. To say that Obama is a pragmatist is like saying politicians want to get elected.  Indeed because they want to get elected they tailor their positions, that is, behave pragmatically. So “pragmatism” is distinction without a difference. . . .  

So does Obama believe and act differently than other politicians?  . . .