Book Sees Harvard’s Influence on Obama

Nietzsche, Weber, and former Harvard faculty members are among many thinkers who led Barack Obama to favor debates and compromises in his policy making in Washington, History Professor James T. Kloppenberg said last night in Boylston Hall.

According to Kloppenberg, the work of scholars such as Clifford J. Geertz, who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1956, and John B. Rawls, a former professor of philosophy at Harvard, brought Obama to recognize that there is no universal truth, and that the best way to approach politics is to attempt to reconcile various points of view.

Kloppenberg presented his new book, “Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition,” as part of the Harvard Writers at Work Lecture Series organized by the College’s Writing Program.

To write his book, Kloppenberg interviewed, among others, former colleagues and teachers of Obama at Columbia and Harvard. He studied Obama’s writings and examined the material he taught when he was a professor at the University of Chicago.

“His course syllabi are fascinating,” Kloppenberg said, explaining that as a law professor Obama encouraged his students to read authors such as Nietzsche and Weber. He would then ask them to use the social theories they had read about to try to come up with different ways of thinking about cases, Kloppenberg said.

“He was encouraging his students not to explore just one point of view but to see all the different arguments in a legal controversy,” Kloppenberg said.

Even though he was writing a book about Obama, Kloppenberg chose not to interview the President.

Kloppenberg said Obama would probably have to deny many of the book’s claims about his aversions to absolutes, adding that it would put Obama in an uncomfortable political position if he admitted the influence many works had on him.

Emma S. Winer ’09, who attended the event, said she was enrolled in Kloppenberg’s class when Obama’s popularity began to rise. She said she thought it was interesting to see how what had been discussed about Obama’s pragmatism in class was now translating into reality.

According to Kloppenberg, last week’s midterm elections’ results and Obama’s recent drop in popularity can be attributed to his penchant for discussion and compromises.

“He, unlike true-believing conservative and radicals, doesn’t think he has the truth. He thinks the truth will emerge from continuing conversations and experiments in policy,” Kloppenberg said. He added that this taste for compromises is often interpreted as a lack of leadership by the American population.

“It can be a frustrating, but that’s the way democracy works,” Kloppenberg concluded.