Community and Control: Critical Democratic Theory in the Progressive Period

Current political debate over the flaws and the fate of the American liberal tradition mirrors closely the critiques of the Progressive period. A number of those thinkers—theorists of “social control,†exemplified by Ward and Ross—took aim not at the liberal-utilitarian conception of the ends of politics but rather at the notion that these goods would be produced by the politics of laissez-faire. A second body of critics—here termed “communitarians†and including Cooley, Royce, Croly, DuBois, and Dewey—leveled a more fundamental indictment: liberal individualism left men's needs for human sympathy, shared meanings and loyalties, and common effort unfulfilled. But the difficulties of the communitarian theorists, the range of associations on which they pinned their hopes and their fundamental ambivalence concerning politics demonstrate how little in the way of ideological or social-structural reinforcement the environment provided for one who would apply the insights of Burke or Hegel or Tönnies in America. Modern political criticism has resurrected the themes of the Progressive period, but even such bridge-builders as Dahl and McWilliams have not been sufficiently attentive to interrelationships among the persisting critiques of liberalism and to the shape ameliorative communities might assume.