by John Marini
The new Progressive political scientists accepted the European doctrines of social justice and a new science of society, which required government to provide political solutions to social and economic problems. The acceptance of the idea of the state as the framework to achieve social justice would result in the rejection of the theoretical and institutional framework of constitutionalism, or limited government. The American social compact had limited the power of government by separating church and state, government and civil society, politics and economics. It had established a defense of the autonomy of the private individual, based on an understanding of nature and the natural rights of individuals. With the acceptance of a philosophy of History and its practical embodiment, and the organic or rational state, the Progressives necessarily rejected the doctrine of natural right and the social compact, or constitutionalism. In addition, the authority of the new doctrines of History and the organic state were further legitimized by the scientific discoveries of the evolution of the living organism, man.
Consequently, Merriam noted that the new scientific theories derived from the study of biology were of great importance in legitimizing progressive doctrines based on an understanding of man as an evolving, or historical, being.17 He noted that “in the general development of political thought many striking changes were made during this period. Overshadowing all others were those caused by the discoveries of Darwin and the development of modern science. The Darwinian theory of evolution not only transformed biological study, but profoundly affected all forms of thought. The social sciences were no exception, and history, economics, ethics and political science were all fundamentally altered by the new doctrine.”18
But Merriam was well aware of the fact that the rejection of the American Founders’ views had been derived from an earlier political theory: “the influence of the German school is most obvious in relation to the contract theory of the origin of the state and the idea of the function of the state. The theory that the state originates in an agreement between men was assailed by the German thinkers and the historical, organic, evolutionary idea substituted for it.” Merriam, like many Progressive intellectuals, had been persuaded by the German thinkers before Darwin and had adopted the newly developed scholarship of the Comtean social sciences on the question of methodology. He noted: “the present tendency is to disregard the once dominant ideas of natural rights and the social contract.… The origin of the state is regarded, not as the result of a deliberate agreement among men, but as the result of historical development, instinctive rather than conscious; and rights are considered to have their source not in nature, but in law.”19
The Darwinian theory, however, did serve to confirm, in a scientific or empirical way, the more abstract theoretical arguments that Rousseau and Hegel had made. By tracing the biological evolution of the various species, Darwin seemed to prove that in the natural world, the lower moves to the higher involuntarily, without apparent design. In the human world, it seemed to vindicate the view that if History is rational, the high (or perfection) will be achieved without, and in spite of, human choice. Indeed, the idea of progress assumes that History itself establishes the conditions that ensure the intellectual and moral advancement of mankind. Consequently, although the new discipline of political science (and the social sciences generally) accepted the authority of Darwinian theory as a ground of its legitimacy, it had already established its theoretical foundations based primarily on the earlier German thought.
In light of the historicist critique of natural right, it was not surprising that Progressive thought came to be characterized by its hostility to constitutionalism and limited government. As Merriam noted: “recent political theory in the United States shows a decided tendency away from many doctrines that were held by the men of 1776.… The Revolutionary doctrines of an original state of nature, natural rights, the social contract, the idea that the function of the government is limited to the protection of person and property—none of these finds wide acceptance among the leaders in the development of political science.… [T]he rejection of these doctrines is a scientific tendency rather than a popular movement.”20 Sociologist Lester Frank Ward observed, “Our Declaration of Independence, which recites that Government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, has already been outgrown. It is no longer consent, but the positively known will of the governed, from which the government now derives its powers” (emphasis mine).21
In reflecting on the evolution of social and political thought in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Charles Beard wrote in 1908:
[I]n comparing the political writings of the last twenty-five years with earlier treatises one is struck with decreasing reference to the doctrine of natural rights as a basis for political practice. The theory has been rejected for the reason that it really furnishes no guide to the problems of our time and because we have come to recognize since Darwin’s day that the nature of things, once supposed to be eternal, is itself a stream of tendency. Along with decreasing references to natural rights there has gone an increasing hesitation to ascribe political events to providential causes. As in history, scholars are seeking natural and approximate causes; they treat politics as a branch of sociology.22
It is not surprising that within the ranks of the Progressive historians, sociology would replace politics as the queen of the new social sciences. After all, August Comte had invented the term sociology and had first called it social physics. It was meant to be the science that could begin the process of rationally ordering society.23
The social sciences were established in the American universities in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In the new disciplines of the social sciences, the state would come to be understood as the moral organism, the vehicle for the ongoing administration of progress by science-trained experts. The great political event that served as the text for the early interpretations of Progressive political thought was the American Civil War. In one of the first and most important books on that war, Elisha Mulford, a Pennsylvania pastor and supporter of Lincoln, interpreted the meaning of the Civil War as it had come to be understood in light of the new conception of the state.24 In his book, The Nation (begun in 1865), Mulford insisted that the Civil War must be interpreted from the perspective of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and his concept of the state. Consequently, he denied what Lincoln had affirmed—that the war was fought over the issue of slavery and the meaning of equality and liberty. Mulford attempted to show that the historical significance of the war could not be understood simply in terms of equality, liberty, or the issue of slavery. He noted: “It cannot be too often repeated, that the War was not primarily between freedom and slavery. It was the war of the nation and the confederacy.”25
As a result, Mulford understood the Civil War as having transformed the country from one of confederacy in terms of the old idea of a social compact, to a new nation understood in terms of the idea of the state.
As he noted:
the aim of political science is the presentation of the nation, as it is in its necessary conception. Its object is to define it in that unity and law which alone is the condition of science. This necessitates an inner and critical justification of its representation. The nation is organic, and has therefore the unity of an organism, and in its continuity persists in and through the generation of men; it is a moral organism, it is formed of persons in the relations in which there is the realization of personality, it is not limited to the necessary sequence of a physical development, but transcends a merely physical condition, and in it there is the realization of freedom and the manifestation of rights; it consists in the moral order of the world, and its vocation is the fulfillment of the divine purpose in humanity in history. The nation as it exists in the necessary conception is the Christian nation.26
For Mulford, the historical development of the nation was rational and inevitable. It was the fulfillment of an historic and divine destiny. In acknowledging the Hegelian understanding of fr
eedom and citizenship within the state, he rejected the view that equality and the protection of individual rights could establish the fundamental purpose of government. Rather, in his attempt to understand the nation scientifically as an organic whole, he was convinced that the common good required a common will, and common will was represented in the moral organism: the state. Moreover, the individual becomes free only when he participates in establishing the moral will by universalizing or rationalizing the particular or individual will. Years later, Woodrow Wilson would observe that he turned to Mulford’s book when he desired some good “mental tonic.” He said it furnished him “with inspiration and philosophy.”27
The state would become the conceptual framework for the understanding of politics in the newly organized discipline of political science and the other social sciences as well. According to John Burgess, the founder of the Department of Political Science at Columbia, the state was “the product of the progressive revelation of the human reason through history.… The gradual growth of the subjective into the objective, the slow refinement of the clash of individual wills into a perfectly coordinated form of human organization … the realization of the universal in man.”28 In denying the importance of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, Burgess insisted that “a nation and a state did not spring into existence through that declaration.… The significance of the proclamation was this: a people testified thereby the consciousness of the fact that they had become, in the progressive development of History, one whole, separate, and adult nation, and a national state.”29 Thus, Burgess would insist that “the national popular state alone furnishes the objective reality upon which political science can rest in the construction of a truly scientific political system.”30
It is not surprising that Columbia-trained Frank Goodnow, first president of the American Political Science Association, in his 1904 inaugural, would delineate the scope of the new discipline in the following manner: “Political science is that science which treats of the organization known as the State.”31 Moreover, it is the will of the people (not the reason of the constitutional doctrine of natural right) that would establish the moral foundation of the democratic state. “The State,” said W. W. Willoughby, “is thus justified by its manifest potency as an agent for the progress of mankind.” And E. L. Godkin, founder of The Nation magazine, although no defender of the socialist state, had high hopes for the new science of economics. He predicted that “the next great political revolution in the Western world” will give “scientific expression to the popular will.”32 The applied social sciences, working in the service of the people, would generate the objective knowledge necessary to carry out that will efficiently.
Politics would, in effect, become administration. Moreover, the end of politics would mean the end of partisan conflict over principles. Thus, for the first time, the power of government, like science, would be used only on behalf of the people. Once a democratic state is established, the unlimited power of government is no longer a danger, and science used in the service of government becomes the great human benefactor. As Walter Lippmann noted in 1914, “There is nothing accidental then in the fact that democracy in politics is the twin-brother of scientific thinking. They had to come together. As absolutism falls, science rises. It is self-government. For when the impulse which overthrows kings and priests and unquestioned creeds becomes self-conscious we call it science.”33 In the modern state, science would become an authority as absolute as monarchy, or religion, had ever been.
In its origins, a kind of religious fervor accompanied the birth of the modern state and the new social sciences.34 In political and social thought, it seemed to require nothing less than a reconciliation of Christianity and Hegelianism. The young John Dewey attempted to make such a reconciliation. In his first job at the University of Michigan, where he was hired by his mentor at Johns Hopkins, George Sylvester Morris, Dewey was still an active Christian. He devoted much of his time to the Student Christian Association. He even conducted a Bible class on “The Life of Christ—with Special Reference to Its Importance as an Historical Event.” In addition, Dewey published a paper, “Christianity and Democracy,” in 1893. However, he was also very much affected by the thought of Hegel, a legacy of his teacher G. S. Morris and his days at Johns Hopkins. Moreover, he was confident of their compatibility. He went so far as to suggest that Hegelian philosophy “in its broad and essential features is identical with the theological teachings of Christianity.”35
In an earlier work, The Ethics of Democracy, published in 1888, he provided his clearest statement concerning the reconciliation of Hegelian idealism and Christianity. Dewey noted:
Democracy and the one, the ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonyms. The idea of democracy, the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity, represent a society in which the distinction between the spiritual and the secular has ceased, and as in Greek theory, as in the Christian theory of the Kingdom of God, the church and the state, the divine and the human organization of society are one. But this, you will say, is idealism. In reply, I can but quote James Russell Lowell once more and say that “it is indeed idealism, but that I am one of those who believe that the real will never find an irremovable basis till it rests upon the ideal”; and add that the best test of any form of society is the ideal which it proposes for the forms of its life, and the degree in which it realizes this ideal.36
This transcendence or reconciliation of the tension between politics and religion (theory and practice) on a higher plane had become possible on the foundation of the democratic state. For Dewey, this was confirmed historically in the coming into being of democratic society. As Dewey noted:
If democracy be a form of society, it not only does have, but must have, a common will; for it is this unity of will which makes it an organism. A State represents men so far as they have become organically related to one another, or are possessed of unity of purpose and interest.… But human society represents a more perfect organism. The whole lives truly in every member, and there is no longer the appearance of aggregation, or continuity. The organism manifests itself as what it truly is, an ideal or spiritual life, a unity of will. If, then, society and the individual are really organic to each other, then the individual is society concentrated. In conception, at least, democracy approaches most nearly the ideal of all social organization; that in which the individual and society are organic to each other. The organism must have its spiritual organs; having a common will, it must express it.37
His subsequent turning from idealism (religious or Hegelian) to the social ethic of democracy is already apparent at this time, as is its necessity in terms of human action. The need for social action, and the development of the methodology of the social sciences, would make metaphysics unnecessary and, indeed, irrelevant. Subsequently, Dewey and those who became pragmatists would reject any necessity of a foundation in metaphysics at all. The truth of God, or metaphysics, had become the truth of science. The aspirations of Christianity and idealist philosophy could be established on earth by science.38
In intellectual terms, it would become possible to reconcile the spirit of science and the new understanding of religion, one that had become secularized as the gospel of humanity in Comte’s ethical teaching. Comte hoped to replace selfish individualism with another concept he coined in opposition to it—altruism.39 As he noted: “the social point of view cannot tolerate the notion of rights, for such notion rests on individualism. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. After our birth these obligations increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service.… Thus [‘to live for others’], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.”40 This moral teaching inspired the Progressives after the Civil War, especially those like David Croly, who w
ould become the most important Comtean in America. Comte’s ethical teaching, along with the Hegelian notion of the state, also provided the inspiration for the Progressives’ understanding of the moral obligations of individuals to the nation, as well as the duty of public intellectuals in shaping popular opinion concerning politics. It is not surprising that his son, Herbert Croly, would write books that inspired Progressive politicians and would also become one of the founders of an intellectual journal: The New Republic.41
The new disciplines of the social sciences would derive much of their moral authority from the view that the theoretical pursuit of knowledge, when united with the scientific method, could supply the means by which to achieve social justice. Positivism had provided a perfect synthesis. It had reconciled the aspirations of religion and science on the new ground of social justice. Unlike justice, which had been understood metaphysically, or unscientifically, social justice is capable of genuine achievement and empirical measurement of that achievement. In the view of the positivists, theology and metaphysics had been abstractions; social science would make the promises of religion a reality. Thus, Christianity had been a religious abstraction; it would become real as the science of sociology. As a leading Progressive theologian, George D. Herron, noted in 1894, “Jesus Christ offers sociology, the only scientific ground of discovering all the facts and forces of life. That ground is his revelation of universal unity.… Sociology and theology will ultimately be one science.”42 The movement from religion to social science was a common one by the end of the nineteenth century.