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Community and Control: Critical Democratic Theory in the Progressive Period*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

David E. Price
Affiliation:
Duke University

Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1974

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References

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45 Louis Hartz finds in Croly a “pathetic clinging to Americanism” whereby the vision of a solidary, rationally ordered community was compromised for the sake of assurances that “perfect individualism” would result; his rhetoric became “practically unintelligible when the crucial questions were posed” (The Liberal Tradition in America [New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1955], pp. 233)Google Scholar. Compare the exposition in Drukman, Mason, Community and Purpose in America: An Analysis of American Political Theory (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), pp. 281–282, 286293Google Scholar.

46 Croly, Herbert, Progressive Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1914), pp. 264–265, 378405Google Scholar. But compare p. 197: “centres of association” in society tend to seek not only “mutual accommodation and adjustment” but also “the realization of common purposes…. Society comes to be conceived as a whole, with certain permanent interests and needs, into which the different centres of association must be fitted.”

47 Ibid., p. 378.

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50 DuBois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk, in Franklin, J. H., ed., Three Negro Classics (New York: Avon, 1962), chap. 2Google Scholar.

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52 The Horizon, February, 1907, p. 8Google Scholar. Compare The Crisis, 2 (June, 1911), 6465Google Scholar; and 9 (April, 1915), 310–312.

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54 See Souls of Black Folk, chap. 9.

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56 Dewey, John, The Public and its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927), p. 73Google Scholar. But note Dewey's own earlier likening of the state to an orchestra conductor “who makes no music himself but who harmonizes the activities of those … producing it” (Reconstruction in Philosophy [New York: Henry Holt, 1920], p. 203)Google Scholar.

57 Dewey, , Public and its Problems, p. 131Google Scholar.

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59 Ibid., p. 71.

60 Dewey, , Liberalism and Social Action, pp. 30, 38, 88Google Scholar.

61 See the rather general discussion in Reconstruction, pp. 197–198.

62 The conceptual distinctions developed by Steven Lukes are helpful here: Individualism (New York: Harper, 1973)Google Scholar. For an argument that Dewey, in effect, overcompensated, reducing “meaning to its public context,” failing “to do full justice to man's inner life,” see Smith, John E., The Spirit of American Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 129Google Scholar. Considerably more sensitive on this score is Royce, whose “whole philosophy could be interpreted as the story of the cooperation and tension between individual and community” (Ibid., pp. 91–98).

63 Public and its Problems, pp. 212, 215.

64 Ibid., pp. 97, 211, 216. For an argument that Royce, in his later writings, was approaching a “multitiered theory of the interpretational community as a promising solution … [to the] time-honored problems of political thought,” see Fuss, Peter, “Interpretation: Toward a Roycean Political Philosophy,” Revue Internationale de Philosophic, XXI, 79–80 (1967), pp. 120131Google Scholar.

65 See Hartz, Liberal Tradition, ch. 9. A needed corrective is provided by Wilson Carey McWilliams, who finds a continuing, if often frustrated, search for “fraternity,” with the sense of emotional security and “assurance of identity” it brings, in American political thought and movements. McWilliams's portrayal of the Progressives, however, is hardly more differentiated than Hartz's; they remained fixated, he suggests, on “the fraternity of race and blood and the fraternity of national ‘mission.’” See The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), chap. 4, 17Google Scholar.

66 See Forcey, Crossroads of Liberalism, ch. 4.

67 Weber, Max, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, translated by Henderson, A. M. and Parsons, Talcott (New York: Free Press, 1964), p. 154Google Scholar.

68 Dahl, Robert A., Modern Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 6Google Scholar.

69 Note the intermixture of themes in such otherwise dissimilar works as Nisbet, Robert A., Community and Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar and Carmichael, Stokely and Hamilton, Charles V., Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967)Google Scholar. Nisbet's mode of social analysis of course has easily discernible nineteenth-century roots, but it is nonetheless instructive to note the tendency of Royce, whose analysis of mass society is easily the most prescient among the American communitarian theorists of the period we have examined, to translate the “crushing” of the individual by “economic and industrial developments” and other “leveling tendencies” in modern civilization into a problem of spiritual estrangement, the loss by the individual of “all sense of his unique moral destiny” (Royce, , “Provincialism,” pp. 7476Google Scholar and passim).

70 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958)Google Scholar. See also Tussman, Joseph, Obligation and The Body Politic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960)Google Scholar, and Wolff, Robert Paul, The Poverty of Liberalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), chap. 5Google Scholar.

71 See Arendt, , Human Condition, pp. 28–37, 305325Google Scholar. Feminists of the Progressive period argued that the participation of women in politics was necessary and justified precisely because their traditional house-hold concerns had become the business of the state. “If women follow only the lines of their traditional activities here are certain primary duties which belong to even the most conservative women, and which no woman or group of women can adequately discharge unless they join the more general movements looking toward social amelioration through legal enactment.” Addams, Jane, “Why Women Should Vote” (1910), in Lasch, Christopher, editor, The Social Thought of Jane Addams (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 145Google Scholar.

72 For a compelling argument as to the continuing moral force of these claims and the concrete forms hey might take in the “administrative state,” see Reich, Charles, “The New Property,” Yale Law Journal, 63 (April, 1964), 733787CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Benjamin R. Barber's fascinating study of the history of a Swiss mountain canton suggests that the view of “freedom” as an absence of constraints, the assumed opposition of the power of the individual and of the collectivity, and an instrumental and defensive view of political participation are not written in the stars, but neither are they likely to be completely transcended in the thought and experience of men shaped by the history and political culture of liberalism (The Death of Communal Liberty [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974], pp. 3–9, 134138Google Scholar).

73 Dewey, , Public and its Problems, p. 191Google Scholar; see also his discussion in Reconstruction, chap. 8. For an interesting modern treatment, which draws heavily on Royce in its grounding of liberal freedoms not in the individual's “autonomy” but in his overlapping (and concentric) “faiths,” see Niebuhr, H. Richard, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), chap. 5Google Scholar.

74 The terminology is adapted from Brian Barry, Political Argument (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), chap. 4Google Scholar. For a discussion of the dilemmas posed for Dewey as a social reconstructionist by his liberal-democratic scruples and his philosophical antidogmatism, see Drukman, , Community and Purpose, pp. 342352Google Scholar.

75 Lowi, Theodore, The End of Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969)Google Scholar. Lowi's follow-up volume, The Politics of Disorder (New York: Basic Books, 1971)Google Scholar, pays more explicit attention to the “social movements” that underwrite the regime of “formalistic democracy and the rule of law.” The focus, however, is on participation as an instrument for inducing political change in accordance with pre-existing wants; even his discussion of the hypothesized gemeinschaft “stage” of organizational development refers to individuals “finding,” “discovering” common interests and irritants (pp. 36–43).

76 Slater, Philip, The Pursuit of Loneliness (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

77 Dahl, Robert A., After the Revolution? Authority in a Good Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 93Google Scholar. Dahl's argument for consolidated jurisdictions and delegated central authority, while issue-specific and anything but doctrinaire, still partakes of the spirit of Ward and Ross and represents something of a departure, it would seem, from the celebration of “minorities rule” to be found in his earlier A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956)Google Scholar. “Our debates about economic institutions,” he laments, “nearly always leave some major alternatives—chiefly ‘socialist’ alternatives—unexplored” (After the Revolution?, p. 119). Yet he still seems to conceive of the public interest in terms of a straightforward implementation of private preferences and to anticipate a harmonious equilibrium between narrowly-based groups and communities—the instruments of “individual effectiveness” (p. 99)—and the instrumentalities of the broader public. The compatibility of pluralist politics with “collective effectiveness” is thus not fundamentally questioned.

78 Dahl's suggestion that a matter “best dealt with by democratic association” should be handled “by the smallest association that can deal with it satisfactorily” seems to be partially rooted in a sense that human interaction and socialization are qualitatively different in “units of human proportions” (Ibid., pp. 102, 165). Yet his discussion of the individual's “wish to live among others” (p. 9) is devoid of the language of dependence or identification, and he defends his preference for smaller units of association mainly in terms of “individual effectiveness” and economy vis-à-vis the attaining of preferences.

79 McWilliams, , Idea of Fraternity, p. 621Google Scholar.

80 Ibid., p. 7.

81 Ibid., p. 74. Local groups and governments, Mc-Williams acknowledges, are “small enough to be meaningful to the individual” and thus might play “a far more immediate role in our security and emotional life than those to whom we are tied by abstractions.” However, McWilliams foregoes any extended examination of the potential of these units as organs of fraternity, conceding more than one would anticipate, given the balance of his argument, to the “functionalist” contention that their viability is severely reduced because “all the great events of political life cross the boundaries of local areas and defy control by them” (Ibid., pp. 69–70). Compare Dahl, , After the Revolution?, pp. 64–67, 8598Google Scholar.

82 McWilliams, , Idea of Fraternity, p. 622Google Scholar. It is not, of course, McWilliams's intention to “offer comfort” to a society where he feels the discovery of fraternity on any large scale is impossible and where, at the same time, attempts to return to a simple social order are subject to serious moral and practical objections. Neither, however, does he wish to belittle the “decencies and humanities” of the New Deal and other welfare-state reform efforts, however deficient their “compassion” and “impersonal condescension” are in terms of the fraternal ideal (Ibid., chap. 19).

83 Ibid., pp. 93–94, 622–624. “The book,” Mc-Williams writes, “is really concerned to open an area for discussion—to ‘set a stage’ for policy suggestions, rather than to make them [itself]… . Certainly, measures for greater ‘community control,’ neighborhood stabilization, etc. would rank very high on the list” (personal communication, February 27, 1974). For further hints along these lines, see McWilliams's discussion of the ill-fated Subsistence Homestead and Farm Security programs of the 'thirties (Idea of Fraternity, p. 550).

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