Compare Personas

William J. Clinton

Linear, uni-directional, non-deterministic. Clinton's political imagination ran on the assumption that history was open and that policy could move it — the "bridge to the twenty-first century" of the 1996 campaign was a literal claim about temporal agency.

William J. Clinton

Substantival and globalising. Clinton's spatial imagination was shaped by the post-Cold-War assumption that markets, information, and democratic institutions were about to render space less politically structuring than it had been since the industrial revolution. The 1990s consensus on globalisation rested on this view.

William J. Clinton

Conventional: substantival, conserved, three-dimensional, local. The Clinton economy's productivity boom and the late-decade budget surpluses were treated as countable evidence that the right material policies produced the right material outcomes.

William J. Clinton

Single embodied person, plural among others, actively engaged. Personal metaphysical agency: a Southern Baptist theism worn with characteristic Southern Baptist warmth in public and worked out more privately in his post-presidential reflection.

William J. Clinton

Conventional Newtonian: finite, conserved, irreversible. The 1990s energy policy was broadly market-realist; the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated but not submitted for Senate ratification, which Clinton's later writing treats as one of his administration's most serious unfinished tasks.

William J. Clinton

Conserved at both scales. The Clinton presidency presided over the consumer-internet boom and treated information itself as a transformative material force. Personal-information conservation through the Baptist inheritance.