Texas Tech University

The Idea of Progress

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UNIT IV: PROGRESS AND THE UNITED STATES

In the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel describes the United States as the “land of the future.”[36] Unlike Europe, the United States in the early 19th century was still in a condition of economic and social transformation. It had inherited European institutions and populations, but was not yet fully matured according to its growth principles. For this reason, Hegel concludes, America transcends philosophy—which is limited, on Hegel's view, to the understanding of what actually exists. The American horizon was thus open for new possibilities of human development.

Hegel did not invent the view of America as the land of the future. Similar ideas can be found in sources of the American political tradition. In the “Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law” (1765), a young John Adams describes the settlement of America as a break with the spiritual and civil despotism that characterized most of European history. In the old world, the canon law—in other words, the Roman Catholic Church—kept tight control over expression and worship, if not conscience itself. At the same time, feudal constitutions limited government of oneself and the community to an hereditary elite. According to Adams, the flight of the Puritans to the New World represented nothing less than a new beginning for the human race, which now had the opportunity to combine the civil freedom of the ancients with the religious freedom afforded by true (Protestant) Christianity.

The product of a committee including Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence implies a similar view. According to the Declaration, “the course of human events” includes periods when it is necessary for people to separate themselves from each other, in order to protect the rights they are granted by God. The political forms that may be established to secure these rights are not predetermined by tradition, law, or even God. Rather, they are the products of human artifice—men acting to secure a divine purpose. In establishing governments to do so, however, men actually pursue their own ends. As has often been noted, the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” does not include any definition of happiness or purpose, apparently leaving the individual to choose for himself what goods he wants to pursue.


American Liberty and the New Science of Politics

Which political forms might allow these aspirations to be coordinated, preventing the degeneration into tyranny or anarchy that the ancient theorists of the political cycle had predicted? According to Alexander Hamilton, writing as Publius in “Federalist # 9,” classical political science could provide no satisfactory answer. It was based on a fixed set of regime types, in which a republic was understood to involve direct rule by the people. If this were the only form of popular government that could be conceived, Hamilton admits, “the enlightened friends to liberty would have been obliged to abandon the cause of that species of government as indefensible.” Fortunately, “The science of politics … like most other sciences, has received great improvement.” Representative government and the separation of powers made possible the construction of a system in which all governmental powers are derived from the people, but not wielded by them directly.

On the other hand, Hamilton does not claim that the American republic represents a complete break with the past. Although the Framers of the Constitution introduced significant innovations, they relied on the political experience of the past and well as the idea of transhistorical natural rights The political progress made possible by American independence, then, is therefore historically continuous rather than disruptive.

Yet the foundations of civil liberty in the United States were incomplete. As was pointed out by many opponents of the revolution, most Americans did not understand the principles of the Declaration to apply to women and non-whites. For slaves and free blacks, the American republic did not have the progressive character that seemed obvious to white citizens. Thus, Frederick Douglass asked “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” His answer: nothing worthy of celebration—at least so long as the principles of the Declaration are not applied universally.

Douglass does more than point out the inconsistency between slavery and the Declaration's statements on equality. He argues that the peculiar institution “fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement …” According to Douglass, slavery is not merely immoral but an anachronism, out of step with the spirit of the age. Deploying the rhetoric of the Enlightenment, he concludes that “No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light.” Appealing to his audience's pride in modern achievements, Douglass attacks slavery as irredeemably old‑fashioned.

Douglass' almost dialectical appeal to the old principles of the Declaration and the Constitution as well as the modern spirit of improvement are paralleled by Lincoln. In the Cooper Union address of 1860, Lincoln claims the mantle of conservatism and progressivism for his anti-slavery politics. For Lincoln, opposition to the spread of slavery is conservative because it can be justified by reference to the original understanding of the American Founding—or at least the understanding of many of its influential participants. On the other hand, it is progressive insofar as it applies those principles in light of current experience. On slavery, Lincoln attempts to steer a course between black-letter legalism and disruptive rejection of historical precedent and authority. Only in this way could the Union be preserved—and be worth preserving.

Lincoln's view deepened and darkened over the course of the Civil War. In a series of speeches and statements, he suggested that the goal of the war was not simply the survival of the Union, but rather its purification through suffering. The process that Lincoln's envisions is less one of linear progress than one of renewal by means of catastrophe. In the Gettysburg Address, his most famous statement on this theme, Lincoln's identifies the purpose of the war as the hope that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” For Lincoln, the 18th century founding was essential but insufficient. Its spirit had to be renewed and promoted by struggle.


Democracy, Nationalism, and the Progressive Imagination

In the years after the Civil War, Lincoln's hope for a new birth of freedom was taken more seriously by intellectuals than by politicians, many of whom shied away from grand projects in favor of peaceful consensus. Emerson and Whitman offer statements of this optimism about the prospects for a new kind of society, drawing on tradition but purged of ignorance and injustice.

Of the two, Emerson's account of the “progress of culture” is the more restrained. Although he hails the unique opportunities available for the development of arts, sciences, and moral character in post-war America, Emerson insists on a “certain equivalence in the ages.” According to Emerson, the modern world has yet to produce works or personalities that equal the ancients in excellence. The important thing is that it has the capacity to do so, but only if the moderns are willing to embrace the best aspects of their time. The obstacle to progressive achievement does not lie in cultural, technological, or social change itself but in the fear of standing out from the crowd—a feature, which Emerson believed characterized a democratic age, as well as the vulgarization of sentiment that attends a commercial society.

Whitman's vision of progress is more democratic. Unlike Emerson, Whitman argues that a democratic people is a collective agent for improvement. The task for the individual who wishes to accomplish something is not to push against the mass of society. Rather, it is to immerse himself in it, to learn its ways and to speak its language. By doing so, Whitman contends, men of talent can establish the distinctive forms of culture that will justify democracy as a superior to earlier social forms. Unlike Emerson, Whitman recognizes no “equivalence in the ages.”

Whitman was not blind to the flaws of 19th century America. Like Emerson, he criticizes the greed and conventionalism of his contemporaries. The solution to these defects of the heart, however, is not political in the institutional or juridical sense. Rather, it is affective and imaginative: in a word, aesthetic. What the United States needs, Whitman argues, is a democratic aesthetics that glorifies its differences from other societies and reminds its citizens of the open horizon before them: “America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself. It must in no respect ignore science or the modern, but inspire itself with science and the modern. It must bend its vision toward the future, more than the past.”

While agreeing with Whitman that the United States must “bend its vision toward the future,” American writers in the early 20th century tended to emphasize the political aspects of progressive development. In particular, they argued that the institutions of representation and the separation of powers that Hamilton claimed had solved the conundrums of popular government were actually an obstacle to its fulfillment. As Herbert Croly put it in The Promise of American Life (1909), “the national advance of the American democracy does demand an increasing amount of centralized action and responsibility.”

Lincoln is the hero of The Promise of American Life. According to Croly, Lincoln's immortal service was to insist against obstinate conservatism “that a democratic nation could not make local and individual rights an excuse for national irresponsibility.” Yet Croly's vision of national responsibility also owes much to European sources. Like Hegel, Croly contends that the United States cannot reach the next stage of its development until it has established a state—understood as a centralized bureaucracy pursuing policies of general interest. This view, which echoes Hegel, was an important inspiration for the “new nationalism” that Theodore Roosevelt advanced in his 1912 presidential campaign as a Progressive candidate.

Woodrow Wilson agreed with his opponent that the American political tradition required thorough revision. In his view, the Declaration of Independence is “of no consequence to us unless we can translate its general terms into examples of the present day and substitute them in some vital way for the examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately involved in the circumstances of the day in which it was conceived and written.” Rather than a commitment to specific institutions, Wilson argues that the Declaration and other documents of the American Founding should be interpreted in terms of broad concepts that could be instantiated in different ways at different historical eras. For example, “tyranny” referred in the 18th century to monarchical government of the colonies. But in the 20th century it could correctly be applied to the influence of trusts and corporations.

Wilson adds to his historico-philosophical argument a pseudo-scientific justification. Adopting the organicism that dominated 19th century thought, Wilson compares the nation to a living being, striving not only to achieve the form determined by its own internal laws, but also to exist in a merciless struggle for survival. According to Wilson, “All that progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when ‘development,' ‘evolution,' is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.”[37] In Wilson's view, this meant granting the national government new powers of economic regulation.


The Redefinition of Liberalism

Progressives did not only argue for the renovation of the Declaration and the Constitution. As inheritors of the political philosophy of Mill and Locke, they also argued that liberalism itself had to be redefined. In a lecture delivered in 1934, one of the worst years of the Great Depression, John Dewey argued that sincere commitment to the central liberal goal—the expansion of freedom—demanded the rejection of classical liberal principles, particularly the principle of limited government.

According to Dewey, limited government had been an appropriate response to the threat of political despotism as it existed in the 18th and early 19th centuries. In the 20th century, however, it degenerated into the “spurious … pseudo-liberalism” that held the government powerless to reorganize the economy to meet public ends. Emphasizing the historical relativity of concepts, Dewey contended that

Even when words remain the same, they mean something very different when they are uttered by a minority struggling against repressive measures, and when expressed by a group that has attained power and then uses ideas that were once weapons of emancipation as instruments for keeping the power and wealth they have obtained. Ideas that at one time are means of producing social change have not the same meaning when they are used as means of preventing social change.[38]

Dewey was especially critical of the ideas of unalienable rights and natural laws that he attributes to 18th century Whiggery and 19th century liberalism, respectively. Rather than pursuing fixed truths about human nature or government, Dewey contends that liberals should adopt an “experimental method” in which policies and institutions are tried or rejected on the basis of their chance of promoting the common good. A potential problem is that Dewey does not explain how the common good is to be determined. Rather than a method in the Cartesian sense, his experimental liberalism has therefore been criticized as rudderless pragmatism.

A skilled politician who realized the appeal of a concrete platform, Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to codify the new liberalism by fusing the old idea of individual rights with a new understanding of their substance. In Roosevelt's view, the achievement of progress required the supplementing, if not the replacement, of the negative rights associated with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights with a set of positive, economic rights guaranteeing to individuals the material means of exercising their freedom. This “economic constitutional order” or “second bill of rights” became the major theme of Roosevelt's presidency.

Despite (or because) they did not go as far as Roosevelt or some of his allies wanted, the expansions of the regulatory and administrative state during the Depression and Second World War achieved considerable success. After the war, Americans enjoyed an extraordinary prosperity. On the intellectual level, this prosperity was reflected by the so-called consensus school of political analysis, which John Kenneth Galbraith mocked as promoting merely “conventional wisdom.” According to the consensus view, the basic goals of the progressives, if not all of their specific arguments, had been vindicated. There was no longer serious debate about the necessity of centralized economic and social management.


Challenges to Progress in Postwar United States

These achievements were not without their discontents. Many Americans remained glaringly deprived in what was proudly described as the richest country on earth. The material prosperity of the postwar era did not translate into the kind of cultural efflorescence that Emerson and Whitman had dreamed. Quite the contrary, the new popular culture seemed more commercial and vulgar than ever.

Such observations produced critical reactions. One response was that the administrative and regulatory state established in the 1930s had to be further expanded, to ensure that all Americans benefitted. Such was the basic motive for the suite of programs that President Lyndon B. Johnson described as the Great Society. Among other features, the Great Society was intended to redress the racial inequities built into the New Deal as a condition of support by Southern members of Congress. Since the sufficiency of the nation's resources were not in doubt, Johnson argued that

The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization. Your imagination and your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth.[39]

The burgeoning New Left challenged Johnson's confidence in Americans' wisdom, imagination, and initiative. The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) offers a powerful argument that postwar prosperity and consensus politics were unable to satisfy the moral aspirations of many Americans, particularly the young. Rather than contentment, the Statement claims that the dominant mood was one of anxiety: “It has been said that our liberal and socialist predecessors were plagued by vision without program, while our own generation is plagued by program without vision.”

SDS' analysis was partly rooted in the critique of mass culture developed by the Frankfurt School—the group of German émigré intellectuals also known as the Horkheimer's Circle. In One-Dimensional Man, Hebert Marcuse deployed the School's characteristic synthesis of Freud and Marx in order to understand the ways in which the material wealth and civil liberty of modern America might undermine the possibilities for both individual self-direction and revolutionary political movements. According to Marcuse, American freedom was really a gaudy form of unfreedom. By understanding choice as the selection between predetermined alternatives—Coke or Pepsi, Democrat or Republican—consumer society and liberal democratic politics reduced human experience to just one “dimension.”

Another aspect of Marcuse's analysis that was used in the Port Huron Statement was the concept of the welfare-warfare state. Marcuse pointed out that the bureaucratic methods characteristic of the progressive administrative state had their origins in military planning. After World War II, Marcuse continued, the U.S. success in improving living standards had been claimed as an ideological justification to oppose the Soviet Union. For Marcuse and SDS, there was little meaningful distinction between the centralized management of a mixed economy, and the wars, both cold and hot, in which its bounty was deployed.

The optimism of the Great Society won out in the short-run. By the 1970s, however, criticism of the progressive movement had penetrated deeply into American intellectual and political life. Speaking from his experiences as a political prisoner in the Soviet Union, Alexander Solzhenitsyn argued that Americans had lost their sense of purpose and direction. He attributed this to the success rather than the failure of the welfare state:

When the modern Western states were being formed, it was proclaimed as a principle that governments are meant to serve man and that man lives in order to be free and pursue happiness. (See, for example, the American Declaration of Independence.) Now at last during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state.[40]

Having realized their individual freedom to pursue happiness, Americans could not imagine any higher purpose. In this respect, Solzhenitsyn argued, they compared unfavorably to Russians, who had preserved in their suffering the understanding that a life worth living had to be devoted to a spiritual goal. Lacking the necessary moral courage, Solzhenitsyn feared, the United States would find itself at a disadvantage in the Cold War, despite its technological and economic superiority.

Jimmy Carter expressed a similar idea in “Crisis of Confidence”—the so-called “malaise speech” that he delivered on national television in 1979. Speaking with extraordinary candor, Carter observed that “We've always believed in something called progress. We've always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.” But now, Carter observed, “Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.” Although the oil embargo and rampant inflation provided the immediate occasion for Carter's remarks, he attributed the crisis of confidence to a much longer series of events that had taken place since the 1960s, including the assassination of popular political leaders, urban unrest, and the defeat in Vietnam.

Carter concluded with an appeal to renewed faith in progress and the American future. But the speech is widely remembered as a statement of liberal pessimism. Whatever Carter's personal views, a mood of disappointment and withdrawal did come to define the American left in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in academic and intellectual circles.

In the 1990s, Richard Rorty developed a polemic against this tendency. A man of the left himself, Rorty urged his compatriots to return to Emerson, Whitman, Croly, and Dewey, in the hope of reviving the progressive project. Without minimizing America's failures and crimes, Rorty contended that social and political improvements were impossible unless they were rooted in national pride. According to Rorty, the Left should appeal to Americans' justified pride in the principles of the Declaration, rather than seeking comprehensive and implausible revolution.

Part of Rorty's argument is a critique of Hegel. In Rorty's view, Hegel distorted the idea of historical development by linking it too closely to philosophy or science, as if the final goal of progress could be determined in advance. As an alternative, Rorty endorses Dewey's suggestion that progress should be pursued through open-ended experimentation.


The Uncertain Future of Progress

Francis Fukuyama, by contrast, argues in The End of History and the Last Man that Hegel was fundamentally correct. For all his flights of speculative fancy, Hegel had contended that the destination of human history was a political form based on recognition of the equal dignity and freedom of every human being. In Fukuyama's view, this condition was realized by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although non-liberal regimes continue to exist, Fukuyama argued that there was no longer any serious theoretical challenge to liberal democracy, particularly when combined with the broad recognition of minority rights that followed the new social movements of the 1960s.

In a challenge to what he regards as Fukuyama's triumphalism, John Gray revives the interpretation of progress as a secularized version of Christian eschatology, a secular religion based on faith in things unseen rather than a sober analysis of the historical record. The core of Gray's critique is an uncoupling of scientific improvement from desirable social change, a key assumption of Enlightenment theories of progress and their descendants. Gray acknowledges that the development of science and technology enhance human power—just as Bacon hoped—but he concludes that this power is always open to use for good or evil—an insight that he attributes to the Hebrew Bible and Greek culture.

Gray's critique of progress is compatible with, and in some measure inspired by, environmentalist arguments that the idea of progress involves the reduction of nature to raw material for human self-assertion.[41] This argument has roots in Heidegger's description of technology as based on “enframing” in which the given aspects of experience are constructed or ‘gathered together' as existing only for purposes of use.[42] The implication is not simply that people should be wise stewards of the natural resources at their disposal, but rather that they should avoid interfering with their existence independent of human needs and purposes. The idea that we should “let nature be” in its own way and for its own sake recurs in some rhetoric of the deep ecology movement.

There is a conviction that the progressive power of technology is deeply rooted in Western culture. In Future Perfect, Steven Johnson applies that argument to recent technological developments, arguing that social networking technologies make it possible to break down traditional distinctions between state and society, and individual and collective action. Does the Internet provide new possibilities for progress? Is it a tool in the hand of an imperfect master or, as radical critics of progress might suggest, a technology that generates its own logic of domination and control?

No syllabus can answer these questions. But it can place them in historical context, and provide students with sources and styles of argument that could be used to answer them. That is the purpose of this course, as the debate on progress continues.


Note on Editions

With the exception of Marcuse, Fukuyama, Rorty, and Johnson, all the texts for this unit are available online in public domain editions or versions that are authorized for open access.


Suggested Questions for Discussion

  • In what respects does Adams regard American society as superior to its European predecessors?
  • What aspects of political science does Hamilton believe have been improved since ancient times? Which, if any, remain constant?
  • In which respects do Douglass and Lincoln agree about the moral status of the Declaration and the Constitution? In which respects do they disagree?
  • What would be the distinctive features of democratic art, in Whitman's view? How does this vision compare to Emerson's? Can you think of any examples of contemporary “democratic art”?
  • What aspects of the Constitution does Croly believe need to be updated? Why?
  • What political point is Wilson trying to make when he contrasts Newtonian and Darwinian science? How does this contrast influence his interpretation of the Constitution?
  • What, according to Dewey, is unsatisfactory about 18th- and 19th century liberalism? Based on your readings for this course (the Declaration of Independence, Smith, Mill, Spencer), how accurate do you consider his criticism to be?
  • Why does Roosevelt believe that a second bill of rights is necessary? Does the second set of rights supplant or supplement the first?
  • Why do Marcuse and the SDS regard the post-New Deal welfare state as threatening to freedom?
  • What does Marcuse mean by the “welfare and warfare state”? How are welfare and warfare functions connected?
  • What defects does Solzhenitsyn identify in the Declaration of Independence? How or what does he propose that Americans should do to remedy them?
  • What is at stake in Gray's description of progress as an “illusion”? To what other “illusions” is progress comparable?
  • Do the social movements and new freedoms achieved since the 1960s represent progress? In what sense? Be sure to consider Fukuyama and Hegel in developing your answer.

Suggested Writing Assignments

  • In what ways has the Declaration of Independence served as a touchstone for American ideas about progress? What about the Constitution? Do you agree that they are “progressive” documents or do they hold back necessary improvements? Be sure to discuss Croly, Wilson, and Rorty.
  • How should the collapse of the Soviet Union affect our understanding of progress? Does it suggest that progress is a useful idea or that is should be discarded? Be sure to discuss Marx, Fukuyama, and Gray.
  • Based on your reading for this course, what is the connection, if any, between technological and social improvement? Be sure to discuss Bacon, Malthus, Marx, and Johnson.

Further Reading

Although explicit references to progress were rare in the Revolutionary and Founding Eras, Americans did make extensive use of theological concepts to make sense of their historical trajectory. The best overview is Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For the antebellum period, see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). There is growing scholarly interest in the role of the idea of progress in American history, particularly among conservative scholars. A good starting point for this literature is The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science, eds. John Marini and Ken Masugi (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). It should be compared with the explicitly left-wing perspective defended by Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism (New York: Free Press, 1977). Both evaluations of the progressive movement contrast sharply with more traditional interpretations, such as those found in Richard Hofstader, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1960); Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Robert H. Wiebe The Search for Order (Boston: Hill and Wang, 1966). Alan Ryan's John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism is a good introduction to philosophical debates in this period (New York: Norton, 1995). An alternative: Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). On the politics of the New Deal, see Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. Alan Brinkley traces the development of the postwar “consensus” in The End of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1996). Rick Perlstein discusses the challenges from the Right in Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Nation Books, 2009). SDS and the rise of the New Left are detailed in James Miller, Democracy Is In the Streets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). The essential background study of the Frankfurt School is Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Jay's account concludes in the 1950s. Thomas Wheatland picks it up from there in The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), including a discussion of the tensions between the Frankfurt School and Dewey's disciples. Students will find a sympathetic reading of Solzhenitsyn in Daniel J. Mahoney, The Other Solzhenitsyn. Kevin Mattson provides an entertaining account of the origins of the “malaise speech” in What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President? (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2010).

Unit IV: Illustrations

Syllabus | Introduction | Secondary Literature | Unit I | Unit II | Unit III | Unit IV


[36] Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, 90.

[37] http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-is-progress/

[38] http://www.heritage.org/initiatives/first-principles/primary-sources/john-dewey-on-liberalisms-future

[39] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/lbj-michigan/

[40] http:// harvardmagazine.com/sites/default/files/1978_Alexander_Solzhenitsyn.pdf

[41] See also John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007).

[42] Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).