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Herbert Croly and the American Promise
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13289 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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10 / 1987 |
5,022 Words |
| Author
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John B. Judis
John B. Judis just completed a voluminous biography of William
F. Buckley, Jr. (Doubleday, 1988). |
The nation, like the individual, must go to school; and the national school is not a lecture hall or library. Its schooling consists chiefly in experimental collective action aimed at the realization of the collective purpose.
- Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life
Herbert Croly is the greatest American political philosopher of the twentieth century. His main work, The Promise of American Life, anticipated the transition from competitive to corporate capitalism and from limited government to the welfare state; Croly influenced Theodore Roosevelt (who borrowed his slogan the "new nationalism" from Croly), Woodrow Wilson, and the architects of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal; and the journal he founded in 1914, the New Republic, was and remains one of the most influential in America. Yet, except by historians, Croly is ignored. Even within the New Republic, Croly's name has been virtually absent since he died in 1930. When the editors made a list in 1938 of the twelve books written in their lifetime that had most "changed their minds," they omitted The Promise of American Life, while including I.A. Richards' The Principals of Literary Criticism. In 1984, when the magazine had its seventieth anniversary celebration, not one of the speakers referred to the magazine's founder or his work. In 1985, when historian David Levy published the first biography of Croly, Herbert Croly and the New Republic, the New Republic did not even bother to review this distinguished and important book.
There are several reasons why Croly has been ignored. Croly does not fall within any recognizable niche. He was a political philosopher who made his living as a journalist and biographer. His writing was often difficult. In his lifetime, the long and repetitious The Promise of American Life sold only 7500 copies. And Croly's philosophy has run counter to the prevailing assumptions of American politics. Croly believed that the promise of American life could only be realized through the energetic and creative use of public, governmental power. The laissez-faire Right regarded him as a socialist and the Marxist Left saw him as a corporatist who, in left-wing historian Gabriel Kolko's words, "was really talking about a utopia led by an alliance of Wall Street and [Theodore] Roosevelt." In the present decade, when Ronald Reagan has announced that "government is not the solution, but the problem," Croly appears to be an anachronism. Yet what Croly had to say about the America of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson is painfully relevant to Ronald Reagan's
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