These two books, each from a distinguished intellectual historian, and each dealing with the life of the mind in contemporary America, intersect in interesting ways. Harvard's James Kloppenburg published Reading Obama with Princeton University Press; Princeton's Daniel Rodgers published Age of Fracture with Harvard University Press. Rodgers blurbs Kloppenberg's book; and Kloppenberg, Rodgers's. At times, one feels a bit claustrophobic.

Yet in scope and methodology, the books differ radically. While Rodgers surveys four decades of American social thought, Kloppenberg examines certain formal aspects of Barack Obama's intellectual development. Taken together, however, the two books illuminate key intellectual currents in contemporary America and their convergence in the mind of one man, the current president. In addition, for all their strengths, both works present problematic aspects that give them heuristic value for others contemplating the challenges of writing intellectual history.

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Rodgers's stark title encapsulates his theme. While others have shied away from attempting an intellectual history of contemporary America, daunted by its complexity, Rodgers appropriates this very complexity as his organizing principle. In area after area, he sees a splintering of ideological constructs and unifying concepts. Somewhat alarming seismic metaphors abound. As the period ends, with once-solid conceptual systems in ruins, “[p]ieces of old and new social paradigms filled the air, full of promise and full of danger” (271). Whereas 1950s public intellectuals like David Riesman and C. Wright Mills confidently analyzed “American society,” such broad-brush generalizations grew rarer as the century wore on and the focus shifted to subgroups and the lone individual.

Rodgers's first chapter, focused on presidential speech, explores how the hortatory rhetoric of the early Cold War—“responsibility, destiny, justice, morality, and society” (17)—faded by the 1970s. With Reagan, “softer, less demanding” themes prevailed, introducing a “new rhetoric of psychic optimism” (28). Reagan and his speechwriters valorized the American people while consistently demonizing and deriding the American government. In his State of the Union addresses, Reagan introduced the practice of singling out specific men or women in the audience for some noteworthy accomplishment, further disaggregating society into a parade of individual heroes.

Turning to post-1970 economic and social theory, Rodgers considers a group of writers (many at the University of Chicago), including the free-market monetarist Milton Friedman; the “law and economics” theorist Richard Posner; and sociologist Gary Becker, who saw the “rational, optimizing behavior” of individuals (64) as the key to understanding social processes; and publicists like Jude Wanniski and George Gilder, who celebrated the wonders of supply-side economics. While neo-Keynesian economists like Paul Samuelson understood markets historically and in specific contexts, and assumed a governmental regulatory role, these post-1970 thinkers invested an abstract “market” with total explanatory power. Objectifying “markets” became “a way of thinking about society,” and then of disaggregating “society” into atomistic economic actors free of “institutional and sociological relationships” (41, 47). Rodgers sees a direct connection between this theoretical turn and the deregulation vogue of the late 1970s and beyond, initially embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike.

This reification of “the market” not only eroded the very concept of “society,” Rodgers argues, but obscured issues of social class and the institutional bases of power—crucial concerns for public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith, who in his 1972 American Economic Association presidential address presciently warned that “in eliding power,” economics “destroys its relation with the real world” (78). As Irving Kristol and other polemicists postulated an amorphous “New Class” of academics and cultural producers allegedly hostile to capitalism, they “packaged conservative resentments against the growth of state power” in quasi-sociological language (85). With political scientists and sociologists embracing “rational-choice” theory, attention further shifted from economic classes and social groups to individuals, and “the search for power disaggregated into a field of microplayers” (89).

Among historians, the class-based studies of the 1960s, influenced by E. P. Thompson and others, yielded to myriad micro-histories of subgroups defined by race, gender, region, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Impressed by French post-structuralism and the “linguistic turn” in literary theory, many historians abandoned analytic categories once considered non-problematic. For J. G. A. Pocock, for example, the American Revolution became a struggle “not only between rival social blocs but also between rival language systems” (98). Younger anthropologists, awed by Clifford Geertz's unraveling of meanings subtly conveyed by Balinese cockfighters, similarly turned from analyzing institutions and social structures to exploring the “play of texts, meanings, and semiotics” (100).

Rodgers finds similar fissures when he turns to the categories of race and gender. The Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, novels by black women writers, even controversies over misogynist rap lyrics, all highlighted gender divisions among African Americans. William J. Wilson's The Declining Significance of Race (1978) underscored economic disparities between middle-class and lower-class blacks. Michael Novak's Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972) blurred the polarities of “black America” and “white America.” Scholarly attention to the “social construction” of race, stressing its definitional imprecision and cultural contingency, further destabilized the term. Conservatives, meanwhile, insisted that discrimination be addressed on a case-by-case basis, not through group-based affirmative-action legislation or class-action lawsuits. Overall, late twentieth-century racial discourse increasingly instantiated “socially unencumbered individuals” (136) unmoored from history or group affiliation.

Gender-based solidarities similarly fragmented as feminists committed to civil rights and workplace equality diverged from “essentialists” who celebrated sisterhood and women's unique sensibilities. Tensions between the movement's white, liberal, middle-class leadership and black, working-class, and conservative women, as well as differences over pornography, lesbianism, and other issues, further splintered the movement, producing “a cascade of disaggregations” (154). Within academia, Joan Scott, Judith Butler, and other feminist scholars engaged in arcane theoretical debates baffling to non-initiates. Even some feminists wearied of the “carnival of words . . . saturated with jargon” (161). Fracture, fracture everywhere.

Meanwhile, newly energized conservative Catholics; Protestant evangelicals; and polemicists like Allan Bloom, William Bennett, Paul Johnson, and Lynn Cheney contributed “a rhetoric of high moral warfare” (169) to the era's debates. For cultural conservatives, challenges to traditional gender roles, not to mention the Supreme Court's 1973 abortion ruling, portended social collapse. Challenging the conservative counterattack, the anti-foundationalist philosopher Richard Rorty saw morality as emerging from lived experience, not an eternal verity handed down from on high. Wherever one looked at century's end, “Every solidarity . . . was open to fissuring” (178).

In chapter 6, “The Little Platoons of Society,” Rodgers quotes Edmund Burke's observation: “To love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.” Amid the erosion of solidarities and conceptual categories (and the vacuity of a content-free, flag-waving patriotism), he asks, what new understandings of society emerged? Here he explores E. O. Wilson's sociobiology; John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), with its famous thought experiment in which one constructs a just society without knowing one's status within it; Michael Walzer's more historically grounded Spheres of Justice (1983); and Robert Nozick's libertarian Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1975), in which “justice” is whatever results from the operations of the market, and “society” comprises “only individual people . . . [n]othing more” (190). Generally nonjudgmental, Rodgers does not conceal his antipathy to Nozick's ideas.Footnote ¹

Some proposed potential sources of civil renewal: Robert Bellah and Robert Putnam looked to voluntarist initiatives, historians highlighted the Founders’ “civic republicanism,” Amitai Etzioni envisioned a communitarian utopia. But the fracturing process continued: Charles Murray in Losing Ground (1984) attacked a half-century of social-welfare policy; Michael Novak issued a conservative counterblast to the US Catholic bishops’ 1986 encyclical asserting the moral claims of the poor; and the cultural wars invaded academe, from textbook battles to debates over campus “hate-speech” codes. Taxpayer-funded vouchers gained favor, enabling parents to opt out of the public-school system entirely. As the quasi-libertarian, free-market backlash intensified, conceptions of society grew “thinner and more fragmented” (220).

In his final chapter, Rodgers notes the pervasiveness of shallow nostalgia, as in Reagan's evocations of a mythic past, even as an authentic sense of history and its contemporary relevance faded. Instead, history became another battleground in the culture wars, marked by heated debates over “history standards” in school curricula. While religious conservatives selectively mined historical sources to prove America's origins as “a Christian nation,” Bible prophecy popularizers looked to contemporary history for signs of Christ's imminent return. Ironically, Rodgers finds an underlying contempt for history, too, in the ostentatious quest of conservative jurists and ideologues (intent on overthrowing rulings they disliked) for the elusive “original intent” of the Constitution's framers.

The Soviet Union's collapse and capitalism's seemingly effortless triumph in the former Soviet sphere reinforced the illusion that history could be short-circuited and radical transformations achieved overnight. Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992) encouraged the comforting conceit that with the triumph of Western liberalism, history had reached a point of final stasis. As the era ended, however, Rodgers finds “a new, more sober recognition of the power of habits and [of] institutions” (253), driven home by Russia's reactionary lurch and by the failed US effort to export democracy and capitalism to Iraq.

In a brief epilogue, Rodgers considers the response to the September 11, 2001 attacks, including the pronouncements of President George W. Bush (and his speechwriter, evangelical Michael Gerson) calling for a renewed sense of common purpose. “We want to be a nation that serves larger goals than self,” Bush intoned; “we are citizens with obligations to each other, to our country, and to history” (259). But the polarizing rhetoric soon revived, the drumbeat of “market” ideology resumed, and the language of sacrifice “skidded toward the third person” as Bush, lauding the GIs dying in Iraq, suggested that “we” should be grateful for “their” dedication (265).

But the longing for a richer conception of society, a sense of purpose beyond the market, and a less polarized civic discourse persisted, as evidenced in the passionate response to Barack Obama's presidential candidacy. As America moved deeper into the twenty-first century, Rodgers concludes, “The disaggregation of the block categories of [the] mid-[twentieth] century had run its course”; the time was ripe for “a reaggregation of social thought .” It would not be easy, however. Those bits and piecces of shattered social paradigms flying about “would have to be reassembled on different frames, [and] the tensions between self and society resolved anew” (270–71).

As Rodgers readily acknowledges, Age of Fracture is “high” intellectual history, focused on a select group of social thinkers. One can always quibble—where are the influential evangelical thinkers Francis Schaeffer and John Stott? Doesn't Ayn Rand deserve more than a fleeting reference? But given Rodgers's approach, his choices make sense. The textual analyses are insightful, as one would expect from the author of a study of “keywords” in American political thought.Footnote ² The persons behind the words, and how they came to their world view, receive less attention. So, too, apart from a few popular-culture allusions, do the processes by which these ideas were disseminated—or critiqued. The roles of fiction, drama, the movies, radio, television, direct mail, or (toward the end of Rodgers's period) the Internet in shaping public opinion lie outside the book's purview.Footnote ³

Closer attention to the diffusion of these ideas might have more fully exposed the role of corporate and monied interests in the process. While Rodgers notes “the new conservative money that began to funnel into the production of ideas in the 1970s” (59), exemplified by William E. Simon's Olin Foundation, and the founding of the (corporate-funded) Cato Institute, Bradley Foundation, Heritage Foundation, and American Enterprise Institute, he downplays these structural developments, focusing on the ideas themselves. My sense is that a more probing analysis of these myriad policy institutes, think tanks, and ideologically driven foundations, including their funding sources, would have enriched the story. Do the billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, who have poured millions into front organizations set up to rally public opinion behind their limited-government, free-market ideology, belong in a history of contemporary social thought? I think a strong case could be made.

While Rodgers considers some non-American thinkers, Age of Fracture offers little systematic cross-cultural discussion of the era's intellectual trends.Footnote ⁴ A more extended consideration of the Mount Pelerin Society, for example, an elite organization of free-market economists founded by Frederick Hayek in 1947, nineteen of whose twenty-six presidents have been non-Americans, might have provided an entrée for such a transnational perspective.

How unique is the post-1970s sense of “fracture” around which Rodgers structures his work? Paul Carter's The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (1971) explored the multiple challenges to evangelical faith and Protestant hegemony that rattled many Americans in the late nineteenth century. Morton White's Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism (1949) examined a group of late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century intellectuals who attacked the era's dominant ideology. Did Americans confronting these controversies feel they were living in an “age of fracture”? Many Americans of the 1920s shared the disorientation expressed in a church journal editorial: “The world has been convulsed . . . every field of thought and action has been disturbed . . . The most settled principles of law and society . . . have been attacked.”Footnote ⁵ Walter Lippmann in a 1929 essay described the corrosive effects of “The Acids of Modernity.” Still earlier, the social and cultural upheavals of the antebellum era dismayed conservatives like James Fenimore Cooper and Noah Webster. Some attention to previous periods of “fracture” would have helped place the ideological turbulence of post-1970s America in historical perspective.

The “fracture” metaphor serves Rodgers well in analyzing intellectual trends in economics, jurisprudence, and certain academic disciplines, though he may overplay the pervasiveness and destructive effects of the processes he describes. Indeed, if Kloppenberg is correct, it was precisely during this fractious period of universal “disaggregation” that Obama's commitment to altruism, civic republicanism, and the importance of seeking common ground took shape and coalesced. The “fracture” trope becomes still more problematic when applied to issues of gender and race. In these areas, the breakup of block categories, which Rodgers finds somewhat unsettling, surely struck many at the time, and many later observers, as a welcome breath of fresh air, a liberating process, opening new possibilities of personal choice, lessening the grip of categorical and essentialist thinking—precisely the kind of freeing up of sclerotic mindsets that pragmatism celebrates.

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If Age of Fracture is the intellectual-history equivalent of Thomas Cole's vast five-part series of paintings The Course of Empire, from Arcadian harmony to desolation, Reading Obama is a minutely observed Copley portrait, exploring aspects of one individual's world view in minute detail. Like Rodgers, Kloppenberg finds his evidence in the spoken and written word, including Obama's two books, Dreams from My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2007); Obama's major speeches; and the diverse thinkers, from the Founders to contemporaries, whom Obama encountered in college and law school. Interviews with various Obama mentors and associates round out Kloppenberg's sources. The book's origins, we learn, lie in the campaign year 2008, when, as a visiting professor at Cambridge University, Kloppenberg discussed Obama with curious students, colleagues, and lecture audiences.

A key to understanding Obama as “a man of ideas,” Kloppenberg argues, is his pragmatism—not the opportunistic “vulgar” variety, but the anti-foundationalist philosophical pragmatism of James and Dewey, who viewed the universe as open and evolving, valued the play of ideas, and argued for testing truth-claims by their practical effects.Footnote ⁶ After discussing Dreams from My Father as “a fable or an allegory” addressing “the challenges of multiculturalism” (6, 9), evocative of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) and W. E. B. Du Bois's “double consciousness,” and briefly considering Obama's boyhood in Indonesia and Hawaii, Kloppenberg turns to the future president's years at Occidental College (1979–81), where he sought authenticity by emphasizing his black identity (reverting to “Barack” rather than the Americanized “Barry”), and joining the anti-apartheid campaign. At Occidental, political scientist Roger Boesche introduced him to key works in the US and European intellectual traditions, from Madison, Emerson, and Tocqueville to Marx, Weber, and Habermas (among many others). Above all, he discovered James and Dewey and other Progressive-era intellectuals. Through Boesche, too, he encountered Gordon Wood's The Creation of the American Republic (1969), a work highlighting the Founders’ “passion for civic virtue as well as liberty” (42) and their efforts to balance individual freedom and the public interest. (Don't all teachers dream that in that sea of impassive faces sits a future president? For Boesche it really happened!)

As a community organizer in Chicago's South Side (1985–8), Kloppenberg finds, Obama modified Saul Alinsky's confrontational strategies by incorporating more collaborative and experimental approaches, having concluded that meaningful change required harnessing individual and group interests to a larger social vision. In Obama's 1988 essay “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City,” Kloppenberg finds evidence of his pragmatism as well as “ideas from Madison, Tocqueville, the social gospel, the civil rights movement, the Alinsky organizing tradition, and contemporary social science” (34). In these years, too, he joined Trinity United Church of Christ, led by Jeremiah Wright, whose pronouncements on American racism would roil the 2008 presidential campaign.

At Harvard Law School (1988–91), especially as a board member and editor of the Harvard Law Review (HLR), Obama encountered swirling debates among feminist and race theorists, radical critics of capitalism, champions of the civic-republican tradition, admirers of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, free-marketeers like Richard Posner, converts to Jacques Derrida's post-structuralism, conservative fans of Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss, and “original-intent” theorists. Particularly influential for Obama, Kloppenberg suggests, were professors Martha Minow and Lawrence Tribe, and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School. Minow's Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (1990) stressed the centrality of dialogue in resolving ideological differences. Tribe, in a 1989 HLR article “The Curvature of Constitutional Space” (which Obama helped research), invoked James, Dewey, Holmes, Rorty, Rawls, and others to challenge free-market and “judicial-restraint” shibboleths and establish a historical pedigree for “pragmatic jurisprudence,” which (in Kloppenberg's paraphrase) views the law “as an instrument for getting things done, not a repository for eternal truth” (60). Sunstein, in another 1989 HLR essay, emphasized (as had Gordon Wood) the interplay of individual liberty and civic republicanism in the Founders’ thought, the law's role in promoting both social justice and individual freedom, and the value of historical perspectives in understanding the judiciary's role.

Testifying to Obama's growing reputation for seeking common ground, faculty and students of all political persuasions supported him as HLR's editor. This commitment underlay his editorial practice of soliciting views from across the political spectrum and in the “scrupulous neutrality” of his own 1990 HLR essay on a recent Illinois fetal-rights case—a stance, Kloppenberg concedes, that may be seen as “either disturbingly evasive or thoroughly professional” (55). Overall, Kloppenberg concludes, Obama's Harvard years deepened his commitment to “republicanism, deliberative democracy, community, and pragmatism” (54).

Returning to Chicago in 1992, Obama joined a law firm, lectured in constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and in 1996 won election to the Illinois state senate. As a teacher, he insisted (in good pragmatic fashion) that students explore all opinions on any given topic, not simply buttress their own position. At gatherings organized by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, he met thinkers and activists ranging from liberal evangelical Jim Wallis to conservative organizer Ralph Reed. These encounters, Kloppenberg suggests, stimulated “a renewed commitment to . . . the public sphere” (78) as the antidote to the culture wars and the erosion of civic engagement—the theme of Putnam's 1995 book Bowling Alone. They also strengthened his pragmatism. Obama's belief that no single individual or group holds an exclusive claim on truth and that wise public policy is most likely to emerge from reasoned discourse, Kloppenberg insists, is “not a sign of weakness, as [Obama's] critics on the right and left allege” (83), but a firmly grounded intellectual commitment.

In discussing the anti-foundationalist thinkers he sees as central to Obama's intellectual formation, Kloppenberg emphasizes “the towering figure of John Rawls” (87). He focuses especially on Rawls's Political Liberalism (1993), which dispensed with the “disembodied rational actors” of A Theory of Justice and acknowledged the importance of history and culture, including “religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines,” in shaping ideas about justice and civic obligation in concrete social settings (108–9).Footnote ⁷ Here again, with particular reference to religion, Kloppenberg addresses the dilemma of the intellectual in politics. While Obama (like William James) recognized religion's psychological and social value, his anti-foundationalism barred him (again like James) from embracing any specific religion's exclusive truth-claims. Yet he also understood that “in politics, like religion, power lay in certainty” (147). This tension between Obama's pragmatism and his awareness of the political utility of exuding absolute assurance, Kloppenberg suggests, is crucial to understanding his performance as president.

Kloppenberg's concluding chapter further explores how Obama's encounter with the main currents of American social thought shaped his view of the public sphere. Through Wood, Sunstein, and others, he fully absorbed the “republican synthesis,” expressed in the Founders’ creation of a governmental structure conducive to reasoned deliberation and capable of adapting to new circumstances—a view quite different from the “comforting fable of founders who discovered unchanging Truth and distilled it into the Constitution” (175). Kloppenberg acknowledges that Obama affirms his principles with an “imperturbability that some critics find eerie and others maddening” (216). Nevertheless, he again insists, Obama's reiterated calls for discussion and deliberation spring not from a lack of convictions, but from his vision of how wise public policy is most likely to take shape. Untrammelled debate “is what a commitment to pragmatism and democracy means” (170).

As for specific policies, Kloppenberg traces Obama's support for progressive taxation, labor unions, business regulation, public education, social welfare programs, and a “rough economic equality” (197) to the New Deal, the Progressive era, and (in a bit of a stretch) the New England Puritans’ sumptuary laws. Turning again to Obama's religious beliefs, he takes seriously the moment when Obama “felt God's spirit beckoning” during a Jeremiah Wright sermon (204)—a conversion narrative Kloppenberg's European audiences dismissed as mere political opportunism. In a 2006 talk at a symposium organized by Jim Wallis, Obama discussed religion as a crucial factor in social mobilization. In his community-organizing days, he recalled, evangelical pastors and Catholic priests were key players in South Chicago's gang-ridden neighborhoods. If he could, Kloppenberg suggests, Obama would modify the Democratic Party's emphasis on interest-group politics and stress civic republicanism, shared values, the power of empathy, and religion's centrality in American life.

Obama's 2008 campaign speech on the Jeremiah Wright controversy and his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize address, says Kloppenberg, summed up his core values. The former, drawing on his biracial parentage, affirmed the power of empathy to transcend differences. While praising Wright's prophetic vision, rooted in the Protestant Social Gospel tradition, he criticized Wright's failure to recognize the potential for change in individuals and in the nation. The Nobel speech affirmed Obama's belief, grounded in American social thought, that a full conception of democracy must incorporate not only political rights, but also concern for social justice and the common good. “[U]nlike every president since [Franklin D. Roosevelt],” Kloppenberg asserts, “Obama understands that liberal democracy reaches fruition only when all citizens possess the resources enabling them to exercise their rights” (242–3). (Admirers of other presidents between FDR and Obama may question that sweeping claim.) Obama's religious commitments emerged at Oslo in his quoting the Golden Rule and his Quakerish evocation of “that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls” (243). For Obama, Kloppenberg concludes, the intellectual humility, capacious civic vision, and collaborative quest for meaning implicit in the pragmatic and civic-republican world views, rather than “swaggering certainty” (261), are the more appropriate attitudes for a democratic leader.

While acknowledging the young Obama's awareness of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr, and mentioning such contemporaries as William Julius Wilson, Cornel West, and Henry Louis Gates Jr, Kloppenberg rejects the claim that African American writers mainly shaped Obama's world view. “[W]e should stop trying to differentiate the black from the white strands in American intellectual history,” he insists; “Obama's writings demonstrate conclusively that his ideas, like the ideas of all American thinkers worth studying, have been woven from many different sources” (252–3). Awareness of the fluidity of human experience and of the contingency of all intellectual constructs, which James called “pragmatism,” suggests Kloppenberg, is, in fact, transnational and universal. He closes the book with Obama's account, in Dreams from My Father, of the complex tribal, political, and cultural cross-currents he encountered on his 1988 visit to Kenya, and his conversation with a (possibly fictional) Kenyan historian who proved to be (in Kloppenberg's words) “a good philosophical pragmatist” (259) as she pooh-poohed the idea of an essential “African” culture, seeing only a constantly evolving kaleidoscope of influences.

Reading Obama illuminates not only the president's world view, but also key themes in American intellectual history. Indeed, as Kloppenberg unravels strands of contemporary thought and historiography, Obama fades from view, sometimes for pages on end. While the book cumulatively builds a convincing case, the precise influence on Obama of a given thinker or intellectual movement sometimes remains oblique or inferential. As David Greenberg noted in his New Republic review, “An ear as finely tuned as Kloppenberg's to the great works of American thought will hear resonances that are going to elude most readers.”Footnote ⁸ The lack of footnotes (surprising in a university-press book) compounds these difficulties.

Except for Obama's tour as a community organizer, the non-academic experiences or popular-culture products that may have influenced his outlook receive little attention. While Kloppenberg briefly surveys Obama's early years and family influences, he focuses almost entirely on his adult exposure to the writings of jurists, historians, philosophers, and social theorists. Readers who view childhood experiences as decisively formative may wish for more attention to Obama's boyhood and the role of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the subject of a recent biography.Footnote ⁹ In Dreams from My Father, Obama discusses his mother's influence at length, as well as early encounters with US popular culture. He mentions his awareness of the white Santa Claus and the white fashion models in the Sears Christmas catalog sent by his Kansas grandparents, the subtle racial dynamics of white and black characters on the TV programs I Spy and Mission Impossible, his annoyance at the “childlike blacks” in the movie Black Orpheus, and the shock of a Life magazine photo of a “black man who had tried to peel off his skin” by using a fraudulent skin-lightening product. “I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page . . . [T]hat one photograph had told me . . . that there was a hidden enemy out there, one that could reach me without anyone's knowledge, not even my own.”Footnote ¹⁰ Such visceral details call into question Kloppenberg's comment (253) that as a boy in Indonesia, Obama “possessed little consciousness of race.” Indeed, the entirety of Dreams from My Father throbs with sharply etched stories evoking the rich texture of a fully realized life and Obama's responses to shaping experiences, beyond the classroom and the library, that he considered relevant to understanding his world view.

Kloppenberg offers an intellectual biography of a comparatively youthful president early in his first term. Other historians have explored the minds of presidents who were also at home in the realm of ideas—Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson—but typically after the full arc of their careers could be assessed. While the contemporaneity of Reading Obama enhances the work's interest and timeliness, it has drawbacks. The book's raison d’être lies in the fact that Obama is no longer an obscure law instructor or state senator, but president, yet we can't fully know how his intellectual orientation will shape his presidency or the life beyond. Kloppenberg offers shrewd observations, but they remain provisional. Assessments of Obama's character, temperament, political style, and core values fluctuate almost weekly. The assassination of Osama bin Laden in a high-risk mission muted criticisms of Obama's alleged indecisiveness, yet as I write (August 2011) political gridlock over raising the federal debt limit and deepening economic fears have revived these criticisms, especially among progressives pleading for forceful leadership, more emotional engagement, even some Truman-style “give ’em hell” rhetoric, and less dispassionate analysis, above-the-fray aloofness, and fruitless appeals for bipartisanship. A disillusioned Maureen Dowd laments in her New York Times op-ed column (9 Aug. 2011): “Regarding [Obama's] political skills, he turns out to be the odd case of a pragmatist who can't learn from his mistakes and adapt.” Next month, of course, the assessments may change. Intellectual biographies of individuals in the full flood of their careers can be risky undertakings.

Further, a politician's intellectual orientation is only one component—and perhaps not even the most important—determining his or her effectiveness. John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, and Bill Clinton were among our more intelligent presidents, yet character flaws or behavioral traits (exacerbated in Wilson's case by a devastating stroke) undermined their effectiveness. On the other hand, Franklin D. Roosevelt, invariably ranked among the great presidents, was pithily described by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr as having “a second-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament.” Kloppenberg fully understands this, of course, and acknowledges that Obama's “intellectual acuity and suppleness,” and his pragmatic commitment to deliberative democracy, civil discourse, and respectfully considering all points of view, may undercut his ability to “inspire and persuade” (xiii) and may even be liabilities in the present political climate—light years from the lofty realms of political and social discourse explored in this work. Such cautionary notes in an otherwise intensely admiring assessment are perhaps proving more prescient than Kloppenberg anticipated.

Despite such caveats, Reading Obama offers many rewards, not least as a significant intervention in the long-running debate over pragmatism and values. Can Obama's anti-foundationalism be squared with his religious faith and commitment to social justice and other public goods? How do we assess the prescriptive authority of the Golden Rule or the abolitionists’ fierce moral opposition to slavery, both of which Kloppenberg invokes favorably, from the perspective of philosophical pragmatism? If all intellectual systems are historically contingent and endlessly evolving, may not the individualistic, free-market turn in contemporary American intellectual and political life that has so bedeviled Obama's presidency simply be a manifestation of that process? If so, on what pragmatic grounds can it be challenged? James Kloppenberg vigorously argues that pragmatism's anti-foundationalism in no way undermines the ethical values, altruistic sensibilities, or religious beliefs that emerge from the ongoing social process of conversation and discussion “rooted in experience and ever mutating in response to new problems” (259). Whether or not one agrees, Reading Obama gives participants on all sides of the debate a rich body of evidence drawn from the fascinating interplay of pragmatism, religion, and civic idealism in the mind of one contemporary American.

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What general reflections suggest themselves? First, in tackling what Kloppenberg calls “the chaos of recent American intellectual life,” both authors merit the gratitude not only of other historians but of everyone concerned with the American prospect and the quality of contemporary public discourse. Underscoring intellectual history's continuing relevance, both books have received wide attention in print and online, in turn stimulating further comments and exchanges.Footnote ¹¹ (Advisory note: in googling Age of Fracture, be prepared to sort out the relevant sites from many others dealing with “hip fracture,” “pelvic fracture,” etc.) Clearly intellectual history remains meaningful to many thoughtful persons eager to understand the contemporary ideological climate as well as President Obama's core ideas.

As my title suggests, the two books offer an opportunity to “compare and contrast” (in the formulation beloved of history-exam writers) two very different approaches to intellectual history. The narrowly focused, single-subject study exemplified by Reading Obama allows for an in-depth exploration of the intellectual influences to which one's subject was exposed through reading, lectures, and so forth. But the challenge of demonstrating how this varied input melded to form the individual's overall world view and shape his or her actions can be formidable. And the natural inclination to focus on the most readily accessible evidence—lectures attended, books read, and so forth—can skew one's results, missing less easily documentable influences. This is not to discourage micro-studies or discount their value, but only to suggest potential problems. Daniel Rodgers's broad-brush approach has a venerable pedigree, harking back to such figures as Vernon Parrington, Merle Curti, and Perry Miller. This, too, can be richly productive, as Age of Fracture makes clear, but it has become awesomely forbidding with our expanding understanding of what a comprehensive “intellectual history” of any era should encompass; the dizzying abundance of potential sources; and the diversity of thinkers, groups, movements, and ideological cross-currents demanding attention. The increasingly intrusive role of well-funded special-interest groups in the marketplace of ideas, and the plethora of outlets available to them, adds to the challenge. The “history of ideas” abstracted from cultural or socioeconomic context, an approach often associated with the intellectual historian Arthur O. Lovejoy, always had its problematic aspects; today those drawbacks loom even larger. Rodgers certainly does not ignore context—the 1970s oil crisis surfaces from time to time, for example—but overall this is intellectual history of a fairly rarified variety.

Finally, Age of Fracture and Reading Obama, read back-to-back, underscore the crucial role of every historian's distinctive sensibility and angle of vision as he or she selects a topic, interprets the evidence, and shapes the finished work. Some reviewers have mildly chided James Kloppenberg for his deeply admiring view of his subject (a wholehearted admiration widely shared at the time the book was written). This may skew his perspective somewhat, but without it would he have been motivated to research and write this valuable work? Probably not. Similarly, as noted above, aspects of what Daniel Rodgers rather gloomily sees as an “age of fracture” strike other participants and interpreters quite differently. It is, of course, precisely such interpretive differences, vigorously argued, that make the study of history, and of intellectual history specifically, so rewarding. Indeed, the intense yet mutually respectful discussion triggered by these books is itself a nice instance of the open, experimental, pragmatic sensibility that James Kloppenberg places at the center of Barack Obama's world view. Sadly, it may work better in academia than in Washington.