Progressive Democracy

Progressive Democracy is a book written in 1914 by author Herbert Croly which continues many of the ideas he wrote in his most important work, The Promise of American Life.

Croly contested the thesis that the liberal tradition in the United States was inhospitable to anti-capitalist alternatives. He drew from the American past a history of resistance to capitalist wage relations that was fundamentally liberal, and he reclaimed an idea that Progressives had allowed to lapse - that working for wages was a lesser form of liberty. Increasingly skeptical of the capacity of social welfare legislation to remedy social ills, Croly argued that America's liberal promise could be redeemed only by syndicalist reforms involving workplace democracy.

Croly's work would continue the ideological development of the Administrative State, having argued in the book that "The government must have the power to determine the Law instead of being circumscribed by the Law". Croly's argument rested upon the notion that government cannot grow bigger administratively unless new laws were put in place that were less restrictive toward government's size and scope.

External links

• Progressive Democracy, full text