The Very Idea of Progressivism

The following is neither a synoptic history of progressivism nor a detailed analysis of it. It is rather one person's perspective on one aspect of its origins and logical goal.

To me progressivism is a stage in a turning away from authoritarianism that began with the Renaissance when Italians began to take the Roman artifacts that lay all about them as well as the Roman and Greek writers as the source for an alternative way of understanding humanity. Up until that time authority, in the form of the Catholic Church, had declared what man was and even what his world was.

The door the Renaissance opened eventually ushered in the Age of Reason in which reason was asserted to be a more reliable guide to understanding man and his world. This eventuated in replacing the religious basis for morality with a basis in human experience and behavior. Immanuel Kant, for example, argued that lying was not wrong because religion said it was. It was wrong because a society could not exist if everybody lied. Thus a test for a moral injunction became," What if everybody did that?" This was a moral rebellion against authority. As to matters of fact, in which the Church claimed explanatory rights using the Bible, first Copernicus presented his view of the earth and the sun as mere speculation to avoid the punishment of the Church. More explicitly, Galileo pointed out that the Church and by implication the Bible were, as a matter of fact, wrong. The Church's view was an egregious example of authoritarian overreach in which human values are ascribed a de facto reality.

Another major step in this transition was the declaration in 1597 by Sir Francis Bacon, the first formulator of the scientific method, that knowledge is power. Up until this point value of knowledge had been generally regarded as intrinsic. The fact that knowledge could generate power over nature as well as understand it was, in effect, the birth of technology as we know it. At this point Western man had freed itself from much of the authoritarianism of the Dark and Middle ages and had established an alternative to religious authoritarianism.

As this rebellion against authority expanded into other levels of society it generated the political movement toward democracy. Some argue that the Protestant Reformation was an essential ingredient in this process. I submit that the all Protestantism did was establish other authoritarian regimes, e.g. Calvin's Geneva, the Pilgrim's banishment of Roger Williams, and Luther's attack on the Anabaptists. Among the most pronounced political expressions of the attack on authoritarianism was the philosophical work of Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Mill, Hume, Bent ham and the Frenchman Rousseau. In this process they defined the state as a contract between the citizens and their government. As such the state could no longer act arbitrarily without the consent of the governed. The American Revolution saw the first thorough implementation of this body of thought. At this point the rebellion against political authoritarianism had succeeded. The state became a function of its citizens.

As the Industrial Revolution, a product of the freed human mind, set in people were increasingly agglomerated into the cities, driven either by confiscation of their land by enclosure laws or primogeniture laws of inheritance. Here they were crowded together in an unsanitary environment of cheap housing, fractured communities, and poverty. This is the world described by Dickens and illustrated by Hogarth. These people provided a cheap source of labor and were victimized both by their long hours of work, poor food and the worst of tenement housing. However, the factory, by gathering many people in one place also provided an environment for organizing that was not available in rural areas. I suggest that it was at this point and under these conditions that the intellectually-birthed rebellion against authority that had led to democracy, now led to the birth of progressivism as we know it. People had democratized their political world; now they would seek to democratize their work and social worlds.

It is, in my judgment, no accident that the rise of political democracy and the industrial revolution are almost exactly coextensive. The human mind, freed from authority, began to reappraise all its institutions in terms of human values. When it turned to the social and work conditions generated by the Industrial Revolution it applied those very human values of fairness and justice. The Industrial Revolution, while accentuating the gap between the rich and the poor also divorced political power from the land. This created an environment in which those struggling for a more just society at least were not burdened as much with class distinctions and the notion that people ought to "stay in their place."

Although in the founding of the American republic wealth and hence property, much of it commercial, played a prominent role in creating our founding documents, (see Kevin Phillips' book Wealth and Democracy), progressivism did not begin to flourish until after the Civil War. The immense jump in industrialization, especially in the North, occasioned the conditions of concentrated poverty that had earlier been unleashed in England. Additionally the massive immigration to the United States of the period brought many of the socialist ideas from Europe. In the United States the Industrial Revolution took hold later than in Europe. Because of our country's large size and the continued presence of the frontier we did not experience the urban poverty-based revolutions in 1848 that Europe did. The frontier became an idee fixe in the American mind and has been politically employed since, notably by Ronald Reagan and his "can do", "walk tall" mantras. It has kept us culturally infantile when it comes to social justice and the common good. As corporations, e.g. railroads, oil, steel grew into conglomerates they began to undertake control of our government. A country of citizens gulled by the Horatio Alger myth thought they were free even as their freedom, based on citizen efficacy, was stolen - not least by the illegal and unchallenged assertion that corporations were persons. The citizen's right of free speech became their newspaper's and eventually their media empire's as they exercised their free speech. As the corporations prospered by weakening the citizens' control over their government and their own lives those citizens were forced into greater and greater poverty. Cheap labor was imported for the mills and sweatshops of industry. Instead of being forced to pay a livable wage, the wealthy kept the difference and became even wealthier. This is in notable contrast to the overseas exportation of industry to take advantage of cheap labor in our time. However progressivism did not stop at dealing with the inequalities of the economy. It spread to all facets of American life. There was a progressive movement in education led by the philosopher John Dewey. Progressivism found expression in law notably in the influence of Justice Brandeis. In literature it found expression in the writings of Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis as well as muckrakers like Ida Tarbell.

During the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration progressivism took root as a nation-wide effort to improve the lot of the American people. This effort resulted in the most egalitarian period in American history. It demonstrated the broad viability of the progressive, people-first approach to governance. It went so far in F.D.R.'s Four Freedoms, proposed as an addendum to the Bill of Rights, as to include freedom from want and the freedom from fear. Notably, all Ronald Reagan had to do was oppose it with the American Horatio Alger myth of self reliance, which he used to destroy government as a citizen-focused institution and that rapidly segued into a "me first" social ethos, in order to bring it down. This simple fact suggest that one of progressivism's central tasks is to redefine American values in terms of the common good focused on helping the individual to optimize her/his potential. This will require a good deal of thought.

As the world becomes more and more independent progressives will have to be ahead of the curve if violence and the destruction of human freedom are to be mitigated as the obvious forces of over-population, declining resources, global warming and environmental degradation converge. One already sees the World Social Forum opposed to the World Economic Forum. It is, in my judgment, an open question as to whether the goals of progressivism and those of capitalism are compatible. Progressivism seeks to free all humans, capitalism only the wealthy.

While some have made distinctions between progressives and populists *, I have sought herein to try to show its roots in the rejection of intellectual, then political and eventually social authoritarianism and its replacement by democracy. Progressivism is the product of a fundamental idea, namely, freedom from tyranny initially of the mind, eventually of the complete human being.

Bob Newhard

* ("Progressivism found support among small businessmen, professionals, and middle-class urban reformers",) populists (" the disgruntled farmers who fueled the Populist movement.") For these quotes see The Dawn of Liberalism: Progressivism http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/lectures/lecture11.html