In Search of Progressivism

The Journal of Markets and Morality, 2016

This paper was delivered in April 2013 at the convention of the Organization of American Historians in San Francisco. It argues that the Age of Reform, which Richard Hofstadter famously identified as extending from 1890 to roughly 1940, lasted instead from the 1890s into the 1970s. The paper sees the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Great Society as the three great outbursts of progressive reform in twentieth-century America.

2002

INTRODUCTION Imagine it is the year 1887 and you are a forty-five-year-old white middle-class man traveling by train into a medium-sized American town. You would likely see some new buildings going up. Perhaps the biggest is a factory, and nearby are the shells of houses for the ...

Since 1900, but especially since the mid-l 960s, American government has been changing into a new form that has been called the administrative state. This revolution-which we will call liberalism, as it calls itself-is as radical as was the American Revolution in l 776. It began with a new theory of justice and of government.

2009

Britain and Transnational Progressivism, 2008

British history. This is even true of recent studies of Anglo-American attitudes. 1 Given the interest of scholars in other Anglo-American cultural connections in the nineteenth century-abolitionism, revivalism, immigration, temperance reform, and political ideology-what explains this paucity of research? 2 Perhaps, British historian C. L. Mowat reflected, it is because historians in each country write history differently. In the United States, historians conceptualized reform as emanating from a constellation of ideas, whereas those in Britain viewed it as entirely isolated from other issues, and thus as the product of individuals or organizations. 3 Though American historians studied reform as a form of a history of ideas, they ironically failed to see the cultural exchange between Progressives in each country. Abandoning this compartmentalized approach to studying these years and using Progressivism as an organizing concept produces an entirely new way of seeing these years, both in Britain and the United States. Though the term Progressive is most commonly associated with the United States, it in fact appeared first across the Atlantic. In 1889, Liberal, Fabian, and socialist members of the London County Council (LCC) were referred to collectively, if awkwardly, as Progressists, a term that eventually metamorphosed into Progressive. Reformers unconnected with the LCC such as Clementina Black and members of the Fabian Society likewise used the term to describe themselves. So did Manchester Liberals, who in promoting a Progressive alliance with the Independent Labour Party from the D. W. Gutzke (ed.

Studia Gilsoniana, 2021

A cultural infrastructure of shared morality is necessary for the success of market economics. Traditional views maintain that religion is the nurturing source of the morality, which grows in the culture. The Progressive revolution aims to overturn Traditional morality and impose its social justice morality on culture. This article dissects and critiques the multifaceted Progressive revolution in the United States, while contrasting it with the Traditional view. It argues that the ultimate aim of the Progressive revolution is to redefine the human person through identity politics as a collective entity, which essentially liquidates the individual, conforms the person to social justice morality, and establishes socialistic economics.

The article, first appearing in The Federalist, discusses the role of the "Gnostic meta-narrative" as a political factor, especially with regard to the march of progressive politics.