Spanning the 1890s to World War I, the Progressive era was characterized by optimism, faith in science and reason, and a commitment to broad social reform. It is remembered, today, mainly for its achievements in combating the social ills associated with new patterns of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, among them poverty, prostitution, and political corruption.

Bob Pepperman Taylor's new book, Citizenship and Democratic Doubt, reevaluates the legacy of the Progressive movement, which he argues embodied two dangerous ideas: first, that democratic politics should be guided entirely by modern science; and second, that the democratic social order (so guided) creates harmoniousness and dissolves conflicts within communities (p. 1). These ideas are dangerous, Taylor explains, not only because they arrogantly dismiss political commitments arising from tradition or religious faith but also because they are themselves self-righteous, utopian, and highly ideological.

In particular, Taylor takes to task three major Progressive intellectuals, John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, and Herbert Croly, who, he contends, succumb to these two errors. According to Taylor, Lippmann is not sufficiently concerned with either political or economic inequality, convinced as he is that mastery of the material world could overcome these (and all other) social ills. And yet, Taylor argues, “the very aspiration of mastery is itself a fantastic dream” (p. 32). Croly idealized public administrators, viewing them as disinterested and self-sacrificing guardians of the public good. However, Taylor questions Croly's apparent commitment to a vision of politics in which individual interests would not be merely sacrificed but actually dissolved “completely into public interests” (p. 43). Of Dewey, Taylor writes, the “specter of an arrogant utopianism haunts even this most humane and pragmatic of American philosophers” (p. 44). In particular, Taylor concludes that there is no hope that Dewey's secular humanism could ever replace conventional religious beliefs in American society and doubts that this would even be desirable (p. 54).

Taylor does praise three more marginal Progressive figures, namely, historian Carl Becker, activist Jane Addams, and conservationist Aldo Leopold. While the Progressive heroes of Taylor's book cannot match the villains as great thinkers, he persuasively shows that they represent an appealing alternative approach to mainstream Progressive social thought. Specifically, he argues that Becker, Addams, and Leopold all practice a model of democratic politics characterized by civic humility and democratic doubt—which Taylor defines as the “suspicion that others may be both as morally good and as morally compromised as yourself” (p. 10). Addams clearly is an exemplar of a civic life that is both noble and humble. Practicing democratic humility, as Taylor defines it, she seems to have generally avoided “the kind of dogmatism and abstraction that infects much contemporary political life” (p. 83). According to Taylor, Becker differed from many of his fellow Progressives in viewing doubt to be “a kind of democratic virtue” (p. 105), while Leopold breaks with the mainstream of Progressivism in general by rejecting “the seductions of building his arguments on moral claims about scientific truth” and avoiding “undemocratic polemicism and dogmatism” (p. 132).

Although many fine works exist on each of these six figures, and on the Progressive era as a whole, Taylor's approach helps identify an important fissure within the Progressive movement, which one would not detect even in classics such as Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform (1955). Consequently, the book provides a valuable supplement to the existing literature and is worth reading by anyone with a serious interest in the history of American political ideas or in the Progressives in particular.

Unfortunately, Taylor's book is strangely decontextualized and makes no significant mention of Populism, the coterminous rural reform movement. It is worth noting that Progressives would champion (some would say appropriate) numerous Populist issues, including tariff and trust legislation. This suggests that the struggles of the agrarian working class were of more than academic interest to the Progressives and, indeed, that the Progressive movement as a whole might have been reasonably responsive to the concerns of people of faith and the traditional value of agrarian life. However, Taylor seems generally uninterested in the practical reforms accomplished by the Progressive movement, or their concrete effects on the lives of both rural and urban communities. Consideration of these reforms would have provided a helpful context for the reevaluation of the ideas of the movement's intellectual leaders, as well as for analysis of the significance of Progressivism for contemporary politics.

There is no denying that this book is quite timely or that the author's arguments represent an important warning to contemporary American secular humanists, liberals, and progressives who might be more inclined to follow the arrogant politics of Dewey, Lippmann, and Croly than they are the humble politics of Addams, Leopold, and Becker (p. 18). If Taylor is to be believed, the challenge for contemporary liberals and progressives is learning to speak to people of religious conviction and traditional values without being either patronizing or dismissive. He cautions, “When their visions become too grand, the Progressives can lose their democratic sympathy with the real citizens found in American society, citizens with religious beliefs, whose own motives are a mixture of interest and principle, and who experience tensions between their private and public concerns” (p. 141).

Beyond civic humility and democratic doubt, however, is the very real risk of capitulation to religious extremism, nativism, or anti-intellectualism. Indeed, some readers might be inclined to think that more—not less—science is needed in contemporary political discourse and that practical problems require solutions that are informed by facts, not faith. This is not to say that the deepest moral commitments (be they religious or secular) of citizens are in any sense irrelevant to democratic politics. Indeed, as Taylor reminds us, the challenge for us today, as it was for the Progressives, is to negotiate an imperfect and ever-shifting equilibrium between these two very different ways of making sense of the world.