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Jeffrey Sklansky, American Progressives and German Social Reform, 1875–1920: Social Ethics, Moral Control, and the Regulatory State in a Transatlantic Context, Journal of American History, Volume 89, Issue 3, December 2002, Pages 1067–1068, https://doi.org/10.2307/3092412
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Extract
The demise of the progressive tradition in American politics in recent years has prompted a heroic effort of historical resuscitation. James T. Kloppenberg, Daniel T. Rodgers, and other scholars have recovered the heady promise with which twentieth-century liberalism was born, the prospect of a just and peaceful resolution to the cataclysmic industrial strife of the Gilded Age. Axel R. Schäfer's fine study of what American progressives learned from their German counterparts adds to the growing literature illuminating the cosmopolitan breadth and ideological daring of turn-of-the-century reform. Schäfer perceptively highlights the contrast between the farreaching agenda progressives brought home from German universities and their comparatively conservative achievements in legislation and regulation, prefiguring the impoverishment of public debate about social welfare by the century's end.
The radical promise of progressivism, for Schäfer, lies in the sweeping alternative to nineteenth-century Anglo-American liberalism presented by German historical economics. In place of the classically liberal ideal of the rights-bearing, self-governing individual, German historicism inspired progressives' reconception of society as an “ethical community” bound by “inner feelings of belonging to a social whole” rather than by the free play of competing interests. This thoroughly social vision, closely associated with John Dewey's model of participatory democracy, guided the most auspicious programs of progressive reform, in Schäfer's view: the largely failed campaigns for municipal ownership of land, utilities, and housing and for universal health insurance. Covering some of the same ground as Rodgers's Atlantic Crossings (1998), Schäfer charts the eclipse of the movement for public utilities by business-friendly regulatory commissions, of public housing initiatives by building codes and zoning laws protecting private property, and of social insurance by workmen's compensation, veterans' pensions, and Prohibition. Attempts to forge a new kind of spiritual commonwealth within modern industrial society gave way to governmental cooperation with business and policing of morals. Ironically, more egalitarian notions of an expansive public sphere were dismissed as Teutonic tyranny amid the anti-German reaction of World War I.
