PROGRESSIVISM AS A NATIONAL NARRATIVE IN BIBLICAL-HEGELIAN TIME

Abstract

Progressive intellectuals at the turn of the last century founded the modern American university, created its disciplines and edited the journals that codified their thoughts. They created the ligaments of the national administrative and regulatory state; they helped legitimate the creation of a national financial and industrial corporate economy. Through the writings of Lyman Abbott, Albion Small, and Simon Patten, three features of progressive thought are underlined: the primacy of a narrative, their hostility to “principled” or abstract-philosophical forms of political and social thought, and their confidence that historical modes of social inquiry would produce “laws”? of progress that would guide practice and anchor values integrating self and society on a democratic basis. Five topics contain these animating features: national patriotism, the new industrial economy, a new democratic ethic, social Christianity, and their critique of the dominance of constitutional jurisprudence and law in American political institutions and practices.