SOME SECOND THOUGHTS ON PROGRESSIVISM AND RIGHTS

Abstract

AbstractAfter summarizing the ways in which Progressive intellectuals attacked individualist understandings of rights and mechanistic understandings of constitutional government, a series of second thoughts on this argument are pursued. The first centers on the ways in which progressivism differed from New Deal liberalism, especially regarding “big government.” Progressive understandings of politics rest on a distinction between “government(s)” and “state,” derived from Tocqueville and Lincoln’s understandings of popular sovereignty. Secondly, this distinction is reinforced by their stress on an articulate and coherent public opinion that would provide democratic legitimacy to all forms of governing institutions, both “public” and “private,” that serve the common good. The Civil War experience was their model, one which they first thought would be reincarnated in the preparation for World War I. Given both private and public assaults on free speech, Progressives in the 1920s often led the movement for protections of civil liberties and for a new respect paid to the First Amendment. The conclusion examines the continuities and discontinuities of Progressive political thought in contemporary political discourse.