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  • Is American Liberalism Singular or Plural?
  • J. Robert Kent
REINVENTING "THE PEOPLE": The Progressive Movement, The Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism. By Shelton Stromquist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2006.
THE LEADER AND THE CROWD: Democracy in American Public Discourse, 1880-1941. By Daria Frezza. Translated by Martha King. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2007.
THE LOST PROMISE OF PATRIOTISM: Debating American Identity, 1890-1920. By Jonathan M. Hansen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003.

In researching Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935, Robyn Muncy looked for an alternative to the highly specialized, scientistic, and often market-oriented professionalism that appears to have become the dominant prototype quite early in the twentieth century. Her study became, she said, a search for "some model for being a professional and a committed democrat," one that would "square" the authority of professional credentials "with a feminist's commitment to non-hierarchical relationships [and] participatory democracy." She came close to finding such a model in the "female professionalism" invented by women who founded and lived in the urban settlement houses.1

Muncy's search replicates a normatively inspired historiography recommended by Van Wyck Brooks—a literary critic and contemporary of these progressive women. Repelled by the acquisitive individualism of America's [End Page 129] "bustling commercial democracy" as well as an alleged dearth of public moral and aesthetic ideals, Brooks suggested a remedy in an article in The Dial in 1918. He suggested that America's literary history, more specifically what F. O. Matthiessen in his American Renaissance (1941) called "the age of Emerson and Whitman," was "an inexhaustible storehouse of apt attitudes and adaptable ideals." Properly understood and appropriated, these attitudes and ideals could be essential resources for an "ethic of personal growth" and a basis for criticism of America's "commercial and moralistic mind."2 Brooks's criticism of popular culture may be construed as elitist and his remedy only a tonic for a few alienated intellectuals, but the project of constructing a "useable past" has had continuing resonance among American historians. Warren Susman traced the salience of this project among historians in two 1960 essays.3 In the late 1960s and early 1970s the discovery of a republican tradition—yet another useable past—instantiated among the Founders and then in the "chants democratic" of the working class throughout the nineteenth century, enabled criticism of an allegedly monolithic liberal tradition classically chronicled and analyzed by Louis Hartz in 1955. This was a discovery that could not be contained within the discipline of American history. America's republican past has since become a normative resource of social and cultural criticism among political theorists and sociologists.4

The recovery of American republicanism has also influenced historians looking for a useable past among progressives between the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the end of World War I. Driven in part by an interest in current political and intellectual issues, these historians have sought to reconstruct the historical roots of a critical perspective that could clarify the normative significance of these concerns. The recent work of Mary Furner provides a good example. Furner has discovered a distinct strain of "new liberalism" during this period—one that differs markedly in its republican and democratic values from both the "corporate" strain of liberalism that emerged at the same time, and from current neo-liberalism "underway since the 1970s, with the 'return of the market,' the unprecedented sway of neoclassicism, and the multidisciplinary appeal of rational choice theory."5 In 1986, as New Deal liberalism retreated before the ascendancy of the New Right in both Great Britain and the United States, James Kloppenberg published a detailed analysis of the republican and social democratic wing of American progressivism.6 Kloppenberg's interpretation complements Furner's in that both have detected and reconstructed a strain of robustly democratic-republican liberalism at odds not only with market liberalisms old and new, but also with the corporate, managerial, and weakly democratic liberalism that dominated American politics from the end of World War II through the mid-1970s. Of course the history that Furner and Kloppenberg have recovered is a bad memory for neo-liberals and...

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