Obama and Pragmatism ed. by Mark Sanders and Colin Koopman (review)

With much talk of President Obama’s pragmatism, there is good reason to explore what this means in terms of his commitments and his policies. When we call Obama a pragmatist, is this merely a way of saying he selects policies and makes decisions that work, quite independent and sometimes against principles he may hold? Or, do we mean to point to something more robust—a kind of pragmatism that emphasizes experimentalism as a cooperative venture, that locates principles in and assesses their worth based on background experiential conditions, that eschews epistemic and practical certainty for fallibilism, that is oriented by a chastened hope, and that is committed to public deliberation as essential to democratic practice? The first description of pragmatism is your run-of-the-mill conception, the second description is associated with a collection of 19^th and 20th century philosophers—Charles Sanders Peirce, but especially William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead.

The journal of Contemporary Pragmatism has done a wonderful service by exploring Obama’s connection to this second—philosophical—conception of pragmatism. The symposium on “Obama and Pragmatism” includes nine essays. As the guest editors Mark Sanders and Colin Koopman explain, the symposium continues a conversation initiated by the late philosopher Michael Eldridge in 2009 at the Summer Institute for American Philosophy at the University of Oregon and again at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy in 2010 (1). Given the interest in Obama as a possible pragmatist, the volume is timely. All of the essays are accessible to a readership that extends well beyond Contemporary Pragmatism and are worth reading. Broadly speaking we might see the essays as a provocation—that is, an attempt to force us to engage the conceptual and practical benefits or limitations of pragmatism as evidenced through one who seemingly embraces the tradition, namely, President Obama. Unfortunately, I will not be able to address all of the articles, and at least in the case of Shane Ralston’s provocative piece on Obama and international affairs and Judith Green’s imaginative reframing of Obama, I shall say nothing except that they ought to be read.

The first three essays by Bart Schultz, Paul Taylor, Mark Sanders and the final two essays by Colin Koopman and Michael Eldridge usefully explore the theory-practice approach to thinking about President Obama as a pragmatist. This approach goes something like the following: To the extent one can discern a set of commitments that define pragmatism, say, for instance, the ones identified above, are they evidenced in the practices and policies of the president? In Schultz’s view, President Obama’s policies seem experimentally unambitious in tackling various inequities and in chastening the power exerted by the wealthy (11). The problem is that what Schultz’s takes as defining pragmatism does not seem especially pragmatic at all. I think Schultz’s is correct, but it isn’t immediately clear why one’s failure to be egalitarian-enough in one’s policies is a violation of pragmatism. I do not mean to say one can’t make an argument for this position, I only mean to say that Schultz’s has not done so. More work needs to be done on isolating the principles of pragmatism and their practical entailments in order to get traction on the question regarding Obama’s relationship to pragmatism.

Mark Sanders and Michael Eldridge, I think, offer a more fruitful set of reflections, although I will suggest they too are unsatisfying. Eldridge’s reflections are more of a sketch due to his untimely passing, culled from separate papers. Nonetheless, both identify a set of pragmatic principles and values and show how they inform the president’s speeches and intellectual development. For Sanders part the claims emerge from the President’s book, The Audacity of Hope and his 2009 speech at Russia’s New Economic School’s graduation. Sanders discerns an embrace of fallibilism and meliorism. Meliorism is the belief that things can potentially (not...