for example, or the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte.[15] Other philosophies were homegrown or developed in conversation with English political thought. Charles Darwin’s biological theory was modified by social philosophers—namely Herbert Spencer in Britain and William Graham Sumner in the United States—to produce a social Darwinist philosophy.[16] Slightly later chronologically but ultimately more influential in the twentieth century was the pragmatic philosophy articulated by William James and John Dewey in the United States.[17] Finally, added on and mixed throughout all of these was the social gospel theology developed and promoted by the likes of Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch.[18] By turning man’s gaze away from eternity and individual salvation and toward a social redemption of humanity, the social gospel preachers were able to tap into the reform spirit of the era and lend their theological credentials to its political leaders.
These new ideas require some explanation in order to make sense of the Progressive movement as a coherent critique of existing conditions and then as a political movement. In order of relative priority for the Progressives, the historical school (and its cousin, historicism), pragmatism, social Darwinism, positivism, and the social Gospel each contributed something vital and unique to the Progressive ferment. Each philosophy in its origins, chief principles, and influence contributed to the agitation for reform from 1890 to 1920.
The Historical School and Historicism
The historical mode of thinking did not begin in the nineteenth century. But the idea that truth could only be understood when placed in its proper historical context took root and grew to its intellectual maturity in the nineteenth century and was by the 1890s regnant among academics and public intellectuals. Perhaps of greatest influence was the Hegelian philosophy of history. While Hegel’s ideas were not imported directly and wholesale into American higher education, they were mediated through early students of Hegel and then by later generations of Americans who studied under Hegel’s disciples in Germany.[19]
The historical school taught that human institutions must be understood as existing in time. They were not ahistorical abstractions but should be understood on the basis of their concrete existence. Leading Progressive academic Woodrow Wilson took this idea over from the British student of English constitutionalism, Walter Bagehot. Bagehot, along with other scholars in the late nineteenth century, focused on the historical development of peoples and their political institutions. As Pestritto explains, while “Bagehot’s The English Constitution gives an historical account of the development of the British system, his subsequent Physics and Politics (1873) more broadly paints the history of political development using the terms of evolutionary biology.”[20] Peoples grow and change; their institutions grow with them. The proper way to understand and study those changes is through examining them over time.
For many Progressives, the approach of the historical school formed the basis of their reforms. But for the leaders of the movement, especially Wilson and his followers, the historical school stopped short of a fully developed theory of history that explained past, present, and future. This is where Wilson and company parted ways with John Dewey or the social Darwinists: for Wilsonians, History had an end-state, a goal. More than a series of endless adaptions over time, history had direction toward a destination. This was Wilson’s historicism. Wilson took this idea from his graduate school mentors at Johns Hopkins, who in turn took this conception of history over from Georg Hegel’s students in the German universities.[21]
Hegel had taught in his Philosophy of History that the world was guided by the spirit of reason, which over time was bringing about the progress of mankind toward the rational state and the fully recognized freedom of the individual within it. Accordingly, Hegel interpreted the dialectic of history as progressive: primitive epochs were succeeded by the more advanced. Civilizations at the cutting edge of history overtook and destroyed those who were less advanced, while incorporating whatever progressive elements were contained in those older cultures. Hegelian theodicy argued that the destruction of an historically inferior people actually facilitated the advance of history.[22] As Pestritto again explains, Hegel provided Wilson and the Progressives with the teaching that “Providence guides historical progress, and history represents the gradual unfolding of the Divine Idea on earth and ends in the modern state, which is the culmination of God’s plan.”[23] This interpretation of history contained profound implications for the understanding of human nature and of government. It became impossible to maintain the Lockean position on government—that governments were created on the basis of a social contract of the consenting people in order better to secure their rights and happiness—in the face of the Hegelian reading of historical progress. Moreover, since nature itself is growing and changing with the spirit of history, it becomes impossible to speak of timelessly transcendent “natural laws” or “natural rights.”[24]
Pragmatism
Philosophic pragmatism contributed another key element to the intellectual ferment that gave birth the intellectual doctrines of Progressivism. Pragmatism as a philosophic system, in brief, stands for the idea that truth is properly understood as a process of determining what works. Truth is to be determined by the probable explanatory ability of a particular theory, not its authority in the realm of principle or abstraction. As William James explained, “It stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method.”[25] Pragmatism shifts the locus of truth away from the abstract and propositional toward the question of functionality.
The philosophic origins of pragmatism lie with nineteenth-century American philosophers Charles Peirce and Chauncey Wright, but the task of developing and articulating a fully developed philosophy of pragmatism fell first to William James. He explained the philosophy in a lecture, later published in 1907, saying that a pragmatist “turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power.” According to James, pragmatism “means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth.”[26] James affirmed that pragmatism consisted in “the attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”[27] The pragmatist observes or discovers truth through function and practical consequences. William James explains that pragmatism’s “only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted.”[28] No truth can be understood as definite, unchanging, or inflexible. James leaves space for analytic truths—that an idea or mathematical expression can be true in the rigid sense. But this is only the case for “purely mental ideas.” Only in the case of analytical statements—those that are true by their own definition—can a belief be absolute. But “the objects here are mental objects. Their relations are perceptually obvious at a glance, and no sense-verification is necessary. . . . Truth here has an ‘eternal’ character.”[29]
While William James was the promoter of pragmatism, John Dewey had the insight to apply the new philosophy to social theory. The instrumental perspective on truth contained broad possibilities for experimentation in human affairs and social or political institutions. Richard Hofstadter explains:
The beginnings of the Progressive era, moreover, coincided with the growth and spread of Dewey’s ideas . . . and it is easy to see Dewey’s faith in knowledge, experimentation, activity, and control as the counterpart in abstract philosophy of the Progressive faith in democracy and political action. It is not far from Croly’s appeal to his countrymen to think in terms of purpose rather than inevitable destiny, or from Lippmann’s assertion that ‘we can no longer treat life as something that has trickled down to us,’ to Dewey’s appeal for an experimental approach to social theory.[30]
The contribution made by the new pragmatic philosophy to Progressive political theory is clear, especially in law and legal theory.[31]