Rousseau mini biography of barack obama
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Beware Our Rousseauian Imaginer in Chief
President Obama is sometimes called the “community organizer-in-chief.” But I’ve come to believe that he’s the “imaginer-in-chief,” master of what I would call “imagined communities.” By this I mean communities that exist as a figment of his imagination. When the president talks about the America he wants to create, he envisions some futuristic ideal community in which all good things exist, but only if the people -- in John Lennon-esque fashion -- first imagine it will be so and then act to make it happen regardless of whether it is possible.
This kind of utopian thinking is not merely political hyperbole, but the main sales routine for the president’s political program.
When he promises a world with “no nuclear weapons,” he invites you to suspend belief regarding whether it is even possible. The real agenda may be as mundane as simply reducing the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, but that limited goal is presented as a step toward fulfilling some future dream which will never be tested by reality. When he promises an America in which “no one will die because they don’t have health care” or no one is poor, he is invoking an image of a world that simply cannot exist. But this matters little because in the world of imagination, an
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Rousseau and the American Electorate
The French-Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) is often dismissed by conservatives on account of the influence of his Social Contract in helping to inspire the French Revolution and its attendant horrors. But far from being an advocate of violent revolution (though he thought it inevitable), let alone anarchy or terror, Rousseau was a thoughtful critic of the excesses of the modern “Enlightenment,” and a defender of the sort of familial-based morality, non-doctrinaire religious piety, political freedom, and national patriotism that he believed essential to the happiness of most human beings. In short, Rousseau not only sought to uphold the qualities that sober conservatives aim to preserve today; he enables us better to understand some of the broad, cultural divisions that have informed America’s electoral politics of late.
Despite being highly learned and a friend of the philosophes who championed the project of popular enlightenment, Rousseau broke with his friends when he published his First Discourse (Discourse on the Arts and Sciences) in 1750, which challenged the assumption that intellectual progress, or the advancement and spread of scientific understanding, went hand-in-hand with moral progress. Like all o