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The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science: Transforming the American Regime edited by John Marini and Ken Masugi
Edited by Claremont Institute senior fellows John Marini and Ken Masugi, The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science brings together eleven essays to explain the conflict between classic natural right and historicism that has been at the core of the Western philosophic tradition, and which plays itself out in an American context as the conflict between our country's founding principles and the modern administrative state. Incisive essays by Will Morrisey, Peter Meyers, Scot Zentner, Paul Carrese, and John West show both the intellectual foundation of Progressivism and the institutional changes required by it, while allowing Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and other Progressives to present their own justifications for replacing the Constitution with the State, and politics with administration.
Larry Peterman highlights the incorporation of Progressive ideas into the universities in a chapter aptly titled, "Aimless Theorizing: The Progressive Legacy for Political Science." Thomas West shows how Progressivism has undermined and replaced much of the American constitutional order, and Edward Erler contrasts the constitutional jurisprudence of Chief Justice Marshall with the living constitutionalism of modern jurisprudence. Eric Claeys and Tiffany Jones bring these lessons up to date by exposing the Progressive influence on modern zoning policies and campaign finance reform. And John Marini, who perhaps more than anyone has plumbed the depths of Progressive thought and found its source in Hegelian historicism, provides a breathtakingly accurate account of the Progressive transformation of the American mind.
—Thomas L. Krannawitter
Hillsdale College
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This article appeared in the Winter 2005-2006 issue of the Claremont Review of Books
