Progressivism and the Doctrine of Natural Rights

Summary

Introduction

Progressive thinkers were revolutionary in their ends, not in their means. They generally condemned what John Dewey (1859–1952) called “radicalism,” meaning efforts to overthrow the government by action beyond established law, let alone through violence. Progressivism, wrote Dewey, “both by its theory and by its own nature is committed to democratic methods of effecting social change.” At the same time, Progressives made clear their plans to attempt to change the basic character of the political and economic system and to discard the theoretical foundation of natural rights philosophy that underlay it.

The immediate target was the Constitution. Progressives saw it as an instrument that thwarted the democratic will and prevented the enactment of policies needed to meet the challenges of the new Industrial Age. (It was virtually an article of faith among Progressives that the people wished for, or could be persuaded to support, the programs that Progressives favored.) An effective system of modern policy-making, Progressives argued, required above all a capacity for planning and experimentation without the imposition of artificial limits on discretion. The Constitution, however, had as one of its primary aims the protection of liberty, understood in large part as individual rights. This objective was built into the structure of the government, with its fragmentation of authority among different institutions and its restrictions on governmental power; and it was further promoted by the listing of different rights in the original Constitution and in the Bill of Rights.