Progressive History

Pragmatism for the win?

I went down the rabbit hole over the weekend. Mostly I read this book:

The author is coming out of the Claremont school and is now teaching at Hillsdale (see Friday’s post). After two intro chapters that provide useful background, including chapter 2 on religious Progressives, a subject not studied nearly enough, each subsequent chapter runs through a list of American historians from the mid-20th c on, giving their take on Progressivism.

• Chapter 3 on historians from 1940s-50s,

• Chapter 4 on historians from 1960s-70s,

• Chapter 5 on historians from 1980s on, now (finally, thank goodness!) critical.

• Chapter 6 concludes.

Watson gives concise summaries along the way, intriguing, apparently open-minded, and basically accurate as far as I can tell (I’m no expert), but always lamenting how these writers just can’t see how Progressivism is against founding Constitutional principles. Watson’s reasoning: because the writers themselves are smitten with progressivism. All this changes in the 1980s with new critiques coming out of the Claremont School.

I don’t know. It’s like bashing a middle child because you don’t think it revered its parents enough, and it has now come to a bad end.

And it was given too much praise (if a bit bland and unconvincing) on its report cards along the way.

I learned a lot from this book, but I don’t know if I recommend it. Definitely there are things wrong with Progressivism as a movement, and its basic ideas are still very active today, perhaps even defining our dominant political temper. We don’t even realize to what extent, so much of it sounds like truism.

As to blaming mid-century historians of Progressivism per se, meh. I have a feeling other things were more likely going on, like America emerging bruised and battered after two world wars, even though we “won.” Stressing that 1) progress is certainly not an inevitable thing: whatever the late 19th c or early 20th c thought it was accomplishing, that got blown away; 2) some “progress” is still worth fighting for: let’s go forward, not backward; 3) we’re all chastened, but America still has something worthwhile to rally around, based on a continuity going all the way back to its foundations; 4) we can and should gather ourselves back together as a people, if for no other reason than to repel totalitarianisms like those of the mid-20th c from ever coming back. — Something along these lines seems to me more likely an explanation for the type of history that got written, than that overly progressive academics couldn’t see how much the movement they were studying really was an open attack on founding principles and the Constitution.

One other thing got to me as well, the connection between pragmatism and progressivism. (Watson only spends a few pages on this.) Certainly, criticisms of the influence of social Darwinism, Hegel and historicism, etc. on Progressivism are well-taken. These other “isms” are scarily implicated. But as to pragmatism… my first thought was that in fact the founders were pragmatic, even more so than Progressives with their ever-evolving agendas and continual improvements, with or without somebody’s Ideal standing at the end of Hegelian process.

What Watson seems to lament most about the “loss” of Constitutional norms is that the Progressives forgot that humans are flawed beings. They’re not infinitely improvable, much less infinitely perfectible. Still, a good reading of the founders’ efforts might be that they were all about setting up pragmatic constraints to prevent exactly that kind of human folly, especially by powerful tyrants. Hence, the importance of “natural” rights to protect against and to prevent abuse. Hence, separation of powers. Hence, the Declaration’s laundry list of offenses by the Tyrant, at all costs to be avoided in whatever is designed next. It was less that founding rights are “natural” (meaning ahistorical, absolute — which seems to be the primary appeal to Watson and co.) than that rights are quite simply useful to provide practical constraints. No metaphysics necessary.

From Federalist 51 (on separation of powers), the “angel” part cited several times by Watson:

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defence must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

This policy of supplying by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power; where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other; that the private interest of every individual, may be a centinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the state.

Source: Federalist 51

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,” there is great difficulty!

So, let’s try to be prudent. This is pragmatism for the win.

Here’s a different review of the book by another American historian I admire, for comparison, also writing at Claremont. Guelzo’s review is an insider take, but it brings up other considerations, such as a fundamental shift to (dangerous) economic power compared to (dangerous) political power over the course of the 19th century, and the impact of the Civil War on the rise of Progressivism in the first place.

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