A colleague expressed surprise the other day at the claim of William James biographer Robert Richardson (which he heard during break, like me, on the radio) that President Obama is a Pragmatist, not just in the way of most successful politicians (where the word simply means flexible and expedient) but in the philosophical sense.
Richardson was passing along the view he and I had both just heard espoused at Harvard in August, by the historian James Kloppenberg. Haven't read his book Reading Obama yet, but Obama's speech at the Tucson memorial sure breathed the air of "What Makes a Life Significant"-- one of the premier popular texts representing Jamesian pragmatism as a commitment to ideals requiring fidelity, courage, and endurance. We won't all get to the mountaintop, personally; but we as a people, as a species, we can. That's Pragmatism.
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