The Real Meaning of “Progressive” Politics
By Barry Loberfeld
To the American mind, the most formal connotation of the term progressive is the Progressive Movement, a period of reform that ranged from the late 1800s to the end of World War I. Unlike its predecessor, the Populist Party, Progressivism was not a movement of farmers or manual laborers. Its guiding lights were college-educated men who were consequently steeped in the post-Enlightenment collectivism that had taken hold of the universities both here and in Europe. Among its apostles were “economists who adopted the ‘organic’ collectivism of the German historical school, sociologists and historians who interpreted Darwin according to the social ideas of Hegel (the ‘reform’ Darwinists), clergymen who interpreted Jesus according to the moral ideas of Kant (the Social Gospelers), single-taxers who followed Henry George, Utopians who followed Edward Bellamy ... ‘humanitarians’ who followed Comte ... pragmatists who followed William James and the early John Dewey.” (Peikoff)
The man who is now virtually synonymous with Progressivism, Herbert Croly (The Promise of American Life), was himself both the son of a noted proponent of Comtian positivism and the student of Harvard's Josiah Royce, a disciple of Hegel. All of these thinkers contributed to what would become the ethical foundation of the Progressive Movement: a contempt and loathing of "individualism" -- and its political expression in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution:
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http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/guides/Progressive.htm
From CP