The Political Thought of Calvin Coolidge. Thomas J. Tacoma

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СКАЧАТЬ was a broad philosophy with adherents who differed with each other over particulars, but at its center were a few key ideas.^[39] The first is a rigorous empiricism—a rejection of metaphysics and religion as superstition. But positivism was not simply empiricism; Comte taught that society was an organic whole in which families, not individuals, were the basic elements of society.^[40] Second, Comte’s theory provided a philosophy of history. This was Comte’s famous “Law of the Three Stages.” As John Marini explains, “Comte’s positivism was dependent upon a theory of the development of the mind, understood as a historical and rational evolution.” This evolution of the mind worked through stages: first a theological era of the rule by priests, second an era of metaphysical or abstract theories that deconstructed the religious ideas that preceded it, and third, the scientific, constructive, or positive philosophy. In the final stage, the “scientific mind is complete, and man can rationally order society.”^[41] The first is ruled by priests, the second by clergy and lawyers, and the third by industrialists and scientists. In this third stage—which according to Comte began in his own time—the positive theory of human knowledge displaced the older modes of accessing truth through speculative reason or divine revelation. Only an empirical science could discern the truth; only social science could provide guidance in social questions. Indeed, Comte is often recognized as the founder of sociology, the scientific study of society.^[42]

      In the United States, positivism was mediated indirectly, especially through British thinkers, but it left an unmistakable stamp on American social thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Gillis Harp explains, Comtean positivism was at or near the heart of Progressive thinking: “[f]or many, it encouraged an interventionist bent, a confidence in the ability to reform; for most, it fostered a faith in technocratic elites; and in general, it nurtured a statist or corporatist bent within American liberalism that continues to play a central role in the nation’s political discourse.”^[43] Comtean ideas held great appeal for American reformers. Initially outside the mainstream of American thought, they brought Comte’s ideas to the fore by the end of the nineteenth century. Lester Frank Ward, for example, discovered Comte in 1875, and his reading of Comte’s philosophy led him to rework his book manuscript. This work, Dynamic Sociology, was published in 1883 to great acclaim. Ward followed Comte in seeing “an interventionist state” as required “by the very laws of social science.”^[44] Ward’s book helped lay the foundation for later Progressive thought. The Comte connection goes even deeper into the Progressive movement. Herbert Croly, a leading Progressive during the movement’s heyday, was literally baptized into Comte’s Religion of Humanity. Harp concludes that Croly and his friends at the New Republic, especially Walter Weyl and Walter Lippmann, “shared an important set of assumptions that were generally consistent with the positivism of Croly and Ward. . . . All were committed to an active, interventionist state and a large public sector in the national economy.”^[45] The philosophy of positivism brought together the social sciences with a vision of where society was going and how it should get there.^[46]

      The Social Gospel

      A final philosophical (or in this case, theological) precondition of Progressive thought, contemporaneous with the Progressive movement, was the emergence of a thickened social gospel theology in the late nineteenth century. As pastors and theologians increasingly confronted the challenges brought to their congregations by the industrial transformations around them, they began to articulate new views of the meaning of Christianity for the modern world. These new conceptions were of a social Christianity, a faith that spoke directly to social ills. This was a Christianity made applicable to the problems of their cities. Social gospel preachers lent the traditional authority of the Christian churches to the proposed reforms of the era; their presence among the Progressives arguably provided a reassuring respectability to the movement and boosted its popular appeal.^[47]

      The leading American social gospel teachers were Washington Gladden, Richard T. Ely, and Walter Rauschenbusch. Gladden, sometimes referred to as the “the father of the social gospel,” published his Working People and Their Employers in 1876, seeking fairness in labor-capital relations.^[48] Gladden, like most other social gospel preachers, was a theological liberal. More influential in developing the social thought and theology of the social gospel movement was Walter Rauschenbusch, professor of Church History at Rochester Seminary. He wrote several volumes explaining and promoting the social approach to Christianity, including Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Christianizing the Social Order (1912), and A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917).^[49] Another American liberal theologian of the era, Shailer Matthews (Dean of the Chicago Divinity School) wrote Church and the Changing Order in 1907, which was the same year as Rauschenbusch’s first major book was released. This was Progressivism’s prime, and Matthews’ book was hailed “as placing the Social Gospel on a firm scientific footing.”^[50]

      The key teachings of the social gospel preachers were relatively few. First, they believed that the social principles of the historical Jesus (a reinterpreted version of the biblical Jesus) should be applied to all societies. Second, this historical Jesus taught the immanence of God as Father of all and the corollary idea, the brotherhood of all mankind. Third, social gospel theologians believed that the heart of Jesus’ message was the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth—a realization of the eschaton in human history. Through the active and reforming work of men, progress toward the realization of the Kingdom was possible.^[51] Progress was possible, though not automatic. Men (and women) must work to improve conditions on earth to bring it about. As with the other philosophies considered here, the social gospel doctrine rejected the ideas of an unchanging human nature—including the Augustinian understanding of original sin and man’s sinfulness in general—as well as eternal verities of natural law. Indeed, one scholar of the social gospel movement recognized the influence of several key philosophers already named—Hegel, Comte, Darwin, Spencer, and Sumner—as major influences in the development of the social teachings of the social gospel.^[52]

      Progressivism as a coherent political reform movement emerged from this ideological and intellectual ferment. These philosophical strands—historical thinking and historicism, pragmatism, social Darwinism, positivism, and the social gospel—were interwoven throughout the Progressive thinking of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. No one philosophy individually constituted Progressivism, but each added to the intellectual gravity of the movement as a whole.

      Principles of Progressive Thought

      The confluence of these philosophic streams was found in the unifying principles of the Progressive movement and its reforms. It is because of their consensus on matters of principle that “the Progressives” and “Progressivism” can be described as a coherent body of thought.^[53] In brief, they shared six widely held beliefs, which included (1) the historical contingency of truth, (2) faith in human progress, (3) a critique of older American political truths and institutions, (4) a redefined understanding of leadership, (5) confidence in direct democracy, and (6) belief in scientific government by expert administrators.^[54]

      As the earlier sections have explained, at the philosophic level, the fundamental agreement of the Progressives was in their doctrine of historical contingency. Truth was a function of history. This means that an idea or principle is good only for its time, inasmuch as it works (pragmatism) or it represents the spirit of the age (Hegelian historicism) or it accords with the evolutionary development of the people (Darwinism). Recognizing the contingency of all truth involved rejecting earlier theories that argued for truth as valid for all times and in all places. For Progressives, the idea of something being “right by nature”—and thus there being rights by nature as opposed to those merely granted by society—had to be abandoned. Instead, the work of politicians was to discern the current conditions through empirical study and thereby to understand what truths were applicable—which policy measures promised the most preferable outcomes. As conditions moved, so too do solutions to political, СКАЧАТЬ