A Genealogy of Progressivism: Twentieth-Century Gnostic Liberalism
John Dewey
What was the Social Liberalism or “progressivism” of John Dewey and the progressive reformers of a century ago? Simply put: it was the “actually existing liberalism” of the early twentieth century. Liberalism, as English political philosopher John Gray argues in his classic book Liberalism, entails three core ideas or normative commitments: individualism, which he characterizes as the belief in the moral primacy of the person over and against the claims of any collective; egalitarianism, or the commitment to the fundamental moral equality of all human beings; and meliorism, or the conviction that the human condition can be improved through the use of applied reason.
To this list I would add one more. Drawing on the work of Pierre Manent, I would include emancipation, or the commitment to the liberation of the “sovereign self” from all constraining structures or forces. “Actually existing” refers to the concrete circumstances within which these ideas are implemented. As Gray argues, in the real world, liberalism never simply materializes in pure form. Instead, liberalism assumes different forms as it is implemented in different national settings or the same national setting at different historical junctures. American liberalism, then, is distinct from French liberalism, just as American liberalism at the time of the Founding is different from American liberalism of today. But, Gray insists, these diverse strains of liberalism are not distinct traditions or discrete “isms.” Rather, they are “separate branches of a common lineage,” “variations on a small set of distinctive themes.” Each is, in effect, the “actually existing liberalism” of its time and place.
Viewed in this way, progressivism can be understood to be the result of the working out of the defining ideals of liberalism in the historically specific context of early twentieth-century America—that is, in the context of rapid industrialization, urbanization, rising inequality and what many Progressives characterized as the moral degeneracy associated with widespread poverty. In order to address these new challenges, self-identified progressives abandoned the principles of negative liberty and the limited state they had inherited from the Founders and their English forebears. Instead, they embraced those of positive liberty and its handmaiden, the interventionist, administrative state. Limited government, the rule of law, and other hallmarks of classical liberalism were to varying degrees replaced by new modalities of governance that permitted the state to regulate more and more areas of life. American society remained essentially liberal; only now the liberal state had a whole new set of political tools for perfecting that liberal society.
Left unchecked, of course, this marriage of the liberal project to the administrative state would have inevitably resulted in an authoritarian political order in which all intermediary institutions were swept away by a totalizing state committed to remaking human nature and society. This did not happen, however. The “actually existing liberalism” of the early twentieth century remained embedded in an essentially Christian cultural matrix that moderated and mitigated its tendentially destructive inner nature. The widespread belief that human beings were bearers of inalienable natural rights, that the nuclear family was a permanent and natural institution, that the administrative state should not interfere in domains reserved to the family and civil society, that Christians had a right to enter the public square as Christians, and that freedom of religion was the “first freedom” and thus entitled to robust protections, established cultural guardrails that in turn limited what the progressives of that era could even conceive, let alone accomplish. Thus, the progressive era was an era of Christian liberalism, different in important respects from the Christian liberalism of the Revolutionary era, but still both recognizably Christian and liberal.
But it was also Gnostic.
The progressivism of the early twentieth century was, in essence, a recombinant ideological organism comprising alleles from both its liberal and Gnostic parents. I have already enumerated the genetic code of its liberal parent. But what do we know about that of its Gnostic one? Quite a bit, as it turns out. Scholars as diverse as Eric Voegelin, Hans Jonas, Harold Bloom, and Cyril O’Regan have all offered insights into both the nature of Gnosticism and the way in which it continues to shape the modern world. While many of these scholars have sharpened the concept’s cutting edge as a diagnostic tool, I think Gerald Hanratty best sums up the critical elements of modern Gnosticism. According to Hanratty, Gnosticism is a tradition of political-theological thought that coheres around three underlying themes: self-deification, or the glorification and divinization of the human self; Prometheanism, or the veneration of the human will’s capacity for rebellion against authority; and what I will call vanguardism, or the belief that human nature and society can be perfected through the intervention of an elite possessing extraordinary insight, learning, or knowledge.
Elohim Creating Adam by William Blake
And so, what did this offspring of liberalism and Gnosticism look like in early twentieth-century America? Let us begin by looking at the interaction effects of liberalism and Gnosticism in the realm of anthropology. Before the mid-twentieth century, the core liberal emphasis on the individual human person’s moral centrality was tempered by a Christian belief that human beings were naturally enmeshed in a broader web of obligations to God, family, community, Patria, etc. In practical terms, this meant that while autonomous, individuals were also subject to the sovereign authority of Nature and Nature’s God and therefore not totally autonomous. In these earlier eras of Christian liberalism, individualism was less about developing the kind of “plan of life” that John Stuart Mill famously advocated than it was about discovering each person’s unique role in God’s divine order and liberating the individual to play that role unhindered.
Within that context, the Gnostic variant of liberalism entailed a radically different set of anthropological assumptions. The combination of Gnostic self-deification and liberal individualism during that era gave rise to a New Man, one embedded in society, but one that sought to be freed from the tyrannical grip of God, tradition, corporate capitalism, or any other irrational or repressive institution. In place of an embedded individual subject to divine authority and the dictates of natural law, there arose a radically autonomous individual properly subject to no superintending authority whatsoever, save perhaps the “community” or some unspecified greater social good. Whereas Christian liberalism involved a foundational commitment to human dignity, Gnostic liberalism entailed unhealthy worship of the individual as a kind of divinity, a demiurge capable of fashioning and refashioning his or her own (human) nature according to the dictates of the sovereign will. The Gnostic liberalism of the progressive era further assumed that all persons must be permitted to live according to their self-defined nature without legal or moral hindrance, in a just society. To be sure, considerable vestigial cultural guardrails remained in place during this era. And those guardrails did limit the extent to which this dynamic played itself out. But this was the dynamic nonetheless.
Similarly, the interaction effects of liberalism and Gnosticism in the early twentieth century can be detected at the sociological level. At this level, the interaction of Prometheanism and emancipation produced a prototype of the twenty-first-century “culture of repudiation” that Roger Scruton would write about nearly a century later—a culture in which every form of constraining tradition, custom, or taboo was denounced as tyrannical or retrograde and then rejected. During the era of Christian liberalism, of course, the liberal commitment to the emancipation of the “sovereign self” from all constraining externalities was tempered by the Christian notion that postlapsarian human society must necessarily place limits on the sovereign will of the individual if society is not to collapse under the weight of sinful human nature. During the progressive era, however, Christianity’s tempering effect at least partly gave way to the amplifying effect of the Promethean valorization of anti-authoritarianism. The result was the repudiation of many of the societal limitations on the sovereign will of the individual, as well as the rejection of the culture through which those limitations had been transmitted from the Founding generation to the Progressive one.
Finally, the convergence of liberalism and Gnosticism in the progressive era gave rise to a new conventional wisdom concerning politics. To begin with, absent the moderating effects of Christian beliefs regarding humanity’s fixed and fallen nature, that era had witnessed the kind of pragmatic meliorism that characterized actually existing liberalism before the early-twentieth-century mutate into a utopian desire to perfect humanity and human society—as Voegelin famously put it, to “immanentize the eschaton.” In the previous century, the liberal idea that the arc of history was bending in the direction of a cosmopolitan and rationalist future was tempered by an essentially Christian belief that “out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight was ever made.” The result was a variant of liberalism that assumed that while the human condition might be improved, it could never be perfected. In the progressive era, however, the embedded and measured meliorism of the past was replaced with a deracinated and unbridled faith in the immanentization of a secular, cosmopolitan, and rationalist millennium. According to this belief, human society could be perfected, made perfectly just, perfectly equitable, and perfectly free. And not only human society—humanity itself, according to the canons of Gnostic liberalism, could also be perfected. Given that humans have no unalterable nature, progressives convinced themselves that at some point in the near future, emerging technologies, eugenics, and even good old-fashioned re-education would finally create the conditions of possibility to make perfectly straight the “crooked timber of humanity.”
And just how was all this to be brought about politically? Simply put, through the state. The interaction of gnostic vanguardism and progressive utopianism gave rise to the view that the desired Novus ordo seclorum could only be ushered in by a Leviathan-like state strong enough to overcome any and all resistance it might face from the forces of ignorance or evil. Such a state would be little more than the Gnostic elite’s executive committee—nothing more than a (blunt) instrument for immanentizing the Gnostic eschaton. To accelerate the movement of history in the right direction, such a state would need to be truly fit for purpose. Whereas Biblical anthropology and Christian natural law established the family, civil society, and the Church as natural and necessary institutions mediating between the state and the individual, progressivism recognized no such natural or necessary institutions. The Gnostic liberal state, progressives believed, would need to free the sovereign individual from all of these tyrannical institutions while ensuring perfect justice and perfect equality. To achieve this utopian goal, they argued that such a state would have to be able to eliminate all forms of identity and thought that did not conform to their political project. In particular, it would have to eliminate attachments (like patriotism), “irrational” belief systems (like Christianity), mediating institutions (like civic associations), and forms of family that had historically proven most retrograde, oppressive, and even violent. Moreover, such a state would have to free itself from those “quaint” restraints like limited government, individual rights (especially religious liberty), and romantic notions of “toleration” that, as FDR put it, were products of the “horse and buggy era.”
British Political propaganda poster for the Liberal Party, 1924
For a century now, Gnostic liberals have worked hard to put behind us those products of the horse and buggy era. Many look back to the “1960s” for the source of our current troubles. But as I have just argued, the real roots of the present distemper are far deeper than that. They go all the way back to the turn of the twentieth century, when figures such as John Dewey and L.T. Hobhouse sought to delete the Christian DNA from the genome of liberalism and insert some Gnostic DNA in its place. It was called “progressivism” back then. When both the movement and the label fell briefly into disfavor in the post-WWII era, it was called “liberalism.” Now the worm has turned, and it’s called “progressivism” once again.
Andrew Latham is a professor of Political Science at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He regularly teaches courses on Conservative Political Thought, Medieval Political Thought, and International Security.