The Dream of Scientific Liberalism: TheNew Republicand American Progressive Thought, 1914–1920

Abstract

Over the years, historians have engaged in various disputes concerning the origins, nature, and results of the progressive movement that dominated the political imagination of Americans during the first two decades of the twentieth century. No one set of categories has dominated those disputes, but much of the controversy has focused on a fundamental tension in progressive thought: the conflict between a liberalism centered in humanitarian and moral passion and one based in an ethos of scientific analysis.