Barack Obama's intellectual influences

Exploring the intellectual influences and ideas which shaped Obama the scholar, teacher and academic.

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Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of America's leading public intellectuals. In this investigative feature from the BBC World Service, he is on a mission to find out what Barack Obama is like as an intellectual.

Appiah explores the intellectual influences and ideas which shaped Obama the scholar, teacher and academic. He goes into the windy quads and tree-lined streets of the campus in Hyde Park on Chicago's South Side, in search of the elemental Obama and asks those who worked with him -- his mentors, academic peers and students -- what shaped his ideas and how he thinks.

Barack Obama's mentor, Abner Mikva, former congressman and Chicago law professor: "I think there's something of the Baptist preacher, and something of Doctor Martin Luther King in his oratory.

"He has gone back to look at the substance of what Lincoln and some of our other great presidents have said, but the style is much more that of the Baptist Church."

It's suggested that Obama struggled to combine his intellectual passions with his moral crusade in the service of the disadvantaged. Obama thought he could resolve that dilemma in post-graduate law.

Lawrence Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard explains: "When we talked about his reasons for coming to law school and for learning the operations of the law, it had very much to do with empowering the worst-off. The rule of law is, I think in his mind, opposed to the law of the powerful.”

Professor Tribe describes his early impression of Obama: "His mind was extraordinary, and its character was somewhat apparent to me from the very first meeting. I met him for the first time when he was a first-year law student, before he had begun to study constitutional law. He came to my office and expressed interest in some of my ideas, some of my writings, and at the end of that meeting I was so impressed by his inquisitiveness, his curiosity, how well-read he was, how thoughtful he was, that I asked him then and there to be my research assistant. And we worked together on two very challenging projects, and on each of them he made a very distinctive imprint, much more than a research assistant would normally do."

"Among my students was the man who's going to swear Obama in as the 44th President of the United States -- John Roberts, the Chief Justice -- very, very smart; but I think that Barack Obama is on the whole at least as impressive, probably more so because of the breadth of qualities that his mind displays, and I suppose it's also a kind of emotional intelligence as well as analytical intelligence."

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