Joseph Postell and Johnathan O’Neill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 63–93.
5.
See Edward A. Stettner, Shaping Modern Liberalism: Herbert Croly and Progressive Thought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993).
6.
See Eldon Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism, especially pp. 8–48, on the role played by key progressives. His edited collection, The Social and Political Thought of American Progressivism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2006), is also helpful as a cross-section of Progressive ideas that go beyond political life.
7.
See Sidney Milkis, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy. The Progressive Party platform can be found in Ronald J. Pestritto and William J. Atto, American Progressivism: A Reader (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 273–287. Woodrow Wilson led the Progressive faction of the Democratic Party to political victory that year – the Progressive Party did not encompass all progressives.
8.
See Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873).
9.
Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), 7.
10.
McGerr, Fierce Discontent, 16.
11.
McGerr, Fierce Discontent, 25–29.
12.
McGerr, Fierce Discontent, 54–55.
13.
William O’Neill. The Progressive Years: America Comes of Age (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 2–7.
14.
Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 104–105. See also Link and McCormick, Progressivism, 10–13.
15.
See especially Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism and Gillis J. Harp, Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1920 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1995). For a more elaborate discussion of the ideas summarized in this subsection on Philosophic Roots, see Part II of Kuklick’s A History of Philosophy in America.
16.
See Hofstadter’s imperfect but still-useful Social Darwinism in American Thought, revised edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).
17.
See, for example, Andrew Feffer, The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
18.
See Paul T. Phillips, A Kingdom on Earth: Anglo-American Social Christianity, 1880–1940 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).
19.
See Pestritto, Wilson, 7–19. See also Morrisey, Dilemma of Progressivism, 27–30. On the background to the transition from historical thinking to legal positivism in America, see Stephen A. Siegel, “Historism in Late Nineteenth-Century Constitutional Thought,” Wisconsin Law Review, Vol. 1990, no. 6 (July, 1990): 1431–1547. Hegel did not initiate the turn to historicism, of course, but his historical thinking played a central role in the development of German thought, which greatly influenced American and British thinking.
20.
Pestritto, Wilson, 13.
21.
Pestritto, Wilson, 1–31.
22.
See generally George W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, translated by John Sibree (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991).
23.
Pestritto, Wilson, 16.
24.
Pestritto and Atto, “Introduction” to American Progressivism, 3–10. See also Scot J. Zentner, “President and Party in the Thought of Woodrow Wilson,” in Presidential Studies Quarterly 26, no. 3 (Summer, 1996): 666–677.
25.
William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Reprint: New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1931 [1907]), 54.
26.
James, Pragmatism, 51.
27.
James, Pragmatism, 54–55. Emphasis in original.
28.
James, Pragmatism, 80.
29.
James, Pragmatism, 209–210. To see how revolutionary pragmatism was, consider the implications of this theory for the truth claims made in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence.
30.
Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 141–142.
31.
Watson, Living Constitution, Dying Faith, 111–154, especially the discussion of the jurisprudence of Oliver Wendell Holmes, 130–147.
32.
Watson, Living Constitution, 60–69.
33.
Sumner, quoted by Thomas G. West, “Progressivism and the Transformation of American Government,” in The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science, 14.
34.
John G. West, “Darwin’s Public Policy: Nineteenth Century Science and the Rise of the American Welfare State,” in The Progressive Revolution, 253–286.
35.
Quoted in Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 44.
36.
See Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 30–55.
37.
See Irvin G. Wyllie, who concluded that the “nineteenth century literature of business success . . . took their texts from Christian moralists, not from Darwin and Spencer” (“Social Darwinism and the Businessman,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103, no. 5 [October 1959]: 634; quoted in John G. West, 256).
38.
John G. West, “Darwin’s Public Policy,” 253–286.
39.
For what follows, see generally Gertrud Lenzer’s Introduction to Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), xiv and following.
40.
Harp, Positivist Republic, 13.
41.
Marini, “Theology, Metaphysics, and Positivism,” in Challenges to the American Founding, 166.
42.
Harp, Positivist Republic, 14–18.
43.
Harp. Positivist Republic, xvi.
44.
Harp, Positivist Republic, 146.
45.
Harp, Positivist Republic, 195.
46.