Daniel Rodgers's Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age

...Still, having watched each effort to transplant European progressive policies on American soil wither and ultimately succumb to powerful commercial interests, the reader begins to wonder whether Rodgers, in his eagerness to overturn Hartzian exceptionalism, has overstated the viability of his "Atlantic progressive connection...

...Transatlantic traffic in progressive ideas thus predominantly moved, Rodgers tells us, in one direction...

...Rodgers has, in essence, not disposed of "American exceptionalism" but substituted a less deterministic version of the Hartzian poBOOKS sition...

...For example, American progressives derived models for social insurance programs like workers' pensions and unemployment benefits from Bismarck-era policies aimed at warding off rather than nurturing socialism...

...Activists in the social gospel movement, the related settlement house movement, and acolytes of Fabian socialism all visited Europe, where progressive policies had already received the test of practice...

...Meanwhile, professional historians, committed to understanding history from the point of view of the downtrodden, have deliberately ignored intellectual "elites" as significant shapers of the political process...

...They studied the texts of Adolph Wagner and Gustav Schmoller, but they were equally diligent students of German factory legislation, the "municipalization" of German transit lines and utilities, and Weimar modernist housing designs...

...The snipping of the American social safety net has been heard round the world...

...Rodgers's pointillist narrative technique often traps the reader in expertly rendered dots of detail, preventing the reader from stepping back to get a sense of the whole of his argument...

...history at New York University...

...Once on American shores, that is, progressive policies behaved more like Social Darwinism than social democracy...

...In Europe "a device invented to curb property's speculative advantages," zoning legislation "flourished in the United States as a realtor's asset...

...At almost every turn, the "Atlantic progressive connection" fails to produce social democracy in America...

...The idea that American society is fundamentally different from Europe's, blessed with exceptional reserves of freedom and prosperity, and therefore governed by fundamentally different assumptions, has, Rodgers believes, obscured the continuities of economic conditions and political ideology between the States and the Continent...

...120 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, Daniel Rodgers's monumental new account of progressive politics in the United States and Europe from 1870 to 1940, could not be more timely...

...if the latter, then his escape seems to have little practical consequence...

...A decentralized state encouraged the free play of commercial interests, placing European progressive ideas into the unstable solution of American interestgroup politics, where those ideas were diluted when not dissolved altogether...

...The grounds for optimism Rodgers does uncover lie in the sheer variety of political ideas progressives in Europe and America produced...

...In his deliberately crude and still-provocative The Liberal Tradition in America, Hartz, a Harvard historian, argued that material abundance and the absence of entrenched feudal structures and hoary aristocratic customs in America made all Americans proponents of a basic ideology of antistatist politics and free-market economics— made them intractable, Lockean liberals...

...In the international power vacuum created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States has assumed the mantle of sole superpower, police force, and economic guru for the "new world order...

...Clinton-styled centrists across Western Europe have put an end to welfare as it had been known...

...In matters ranging from city planning to social insurance to public housing, European locales served, in the words of one American reformer, as an "experiment-station for us all...

...But by attributing failure to mutable social and political alignments rather than immutable ideological proclivities, Rodgers argues that this outcome was not predetermined...

...DAVID S. SAMPLINER is a Ph.D...

...It also provides an important corrective to that age-old narcissism, now once again inflamed, that insists on the uniqueness and superiority of the American capitalist vision...

...Starting in the 1870s, American scholars began traveling to European universities, particularly German ones, to study economics and other social sciences...

...THERE WERE both advantages and disadvantages to the United States's "laggard" position with respect to European progressive reform...

...Recent events have lent new credibility to this old boast...

...At the conclusion of Rodgers's story, World War II would create substantial disparity between American prosperity and European poverty, diminishing the force of the connections that American progressives, for nearly seventy years, tried to forge in American minds between the economic predicaments in Europe and America...

...Rodgers supports his case for the influence of a "transatlantic progressive connection" with a wealth of evidence that only a historian's historian could have had the patience to collect, and that perhaps only professional historians will have the patience to read all the way through...

...Rodgers here avoids dogmatic assertions about the continuity between European and American progressive worlds, revealing instead the subtleties of transatlantic exchange...

...Part of the dynamism of Rodgers's story derives from his keen sensitivity to its ironies...

...From the Puritan John Winthrop's vision of a "city on a hill" to Ronald Reagan's invocation of Winthrop at the 1984 Republican National Convention, extolling the "shining city on a hill," Americans have long considered the American way to be both singular and exemplary...

...It allowed American progressives to shop in ports throughout Europe for ready-made, reality-tested social policies...

...They became acquainted with progressive ideas in the classroom while witnessing the implementation of progressive policies in the streets...

...A spirited challenge to conventional interpretations of American progressive politics, Rodgers's book evokes a forgotten period when big government was respected, and when America borrowed blueprints for building activist governments from Europe...

...After 1870, Rodgers explains, reformers shifted their efforts from politics to the economy, seeking to unleash state power to curb the unbridled individualism of the free market and mitigate its worst evils...

...Against these political and academic currents, Rodgers asserts the importance of ideas to politics and the significance of progressive thought as a discourse of dissent from the dogma of laissezfaire capitalism...

...Given our own era's unprecedented lack of confidence in statist solutions to social problems, Rodgers's tale reopens a vast storehouse of collectivist strategies for protecting the social order from capitalism's most damaging blows...

...Rodgers's main quarry is the stubborn bogey of American historians, particularly of the American left: the ideology of "American exceptionalism...

...One can read Atlantic Crossings, in short, as Rodgers's 508-page wrestling match with 122 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 the ghost of Louis Hartz...

...A dizzying array of American and European reformers fills its pages, yet few emerge as distinct personages...

...As a result, the book is sort of like a Chuck Close portrait gone awry...

...at other times, as in the case of David Lubin's cooperative credit associations for farmers, American intellectuals themselves are responsible for steering progressive reforms down more Lockean channels...

...Conservatives, who reject progressives' belief in activist government, see them as failed, misguided visionaries, while many on the left revile them for their desire to emend rather than upend American capiBOOKS talism...

...As he DISSENT / Spring I999 n 121 BOOKS shrewdly observes, the very malleability that made European social policies transportable rendered them vulnerable to corporate hands eager to bend cooperative designs toward the ends of private profit...

...Rodgers's massive accumulation of detail, while somewhat of an encumbrance to the general reader, is, in this respect, central to his argument: against today's impoverished social imagination Rodgers reveals the early twentieth century to have been an embarrassment of riches...

...On the other hand, the relative immaturity of social democratic institutions combined with the relative maturity of political democracy to hamper the realization of progressive policies advancing collectivist ideals...

...The book's interpretive innovation is the result of an ambitious methodological departure...

...From Rodgers's account, one is left to conclude that American progressive intellectuals were part of an American liberal consensus, as Hartz suggested, or, if not, were too powerless to disrupt it...

...Until 1870, reformers in the United States and Europe viewed reform as a means of restraining the power of the state...

...He does not quarrel with Hartz's reading of the results of progressive reform but with his interpretation of the reasons for its failure...

...DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 123...

...In contrast to Hartz, Rodgers blames contingent social circumstances, not entrenched ideological leanings, for the failure of progressive politics in America...

...In a land of monopoly capitalism, collective measures often became nearly indistinguishable from commercial enterprises...

...candidate in U.S...

...Although Rodgers never mentions Hartz, either in the text or in the footnotes, his book clearly represents an attempt to correct Hartz's excesses and to reveal sources of optimism for the progressive project in America where Hartz saw only gloom...

...Importation of European ideas into the American context occurs, almost simultaneously, with their co-optation by capitalist forces...

...Before and after the Great War, racial and ethnic divisions, sharpened by massive immigration from East Europe and Southern Italy, prevented the formation of powerful lobbies supporting collectivist policies...

...In the late nineteenth century, Americans lagged behind the reform curve...

...The case of zoning laws provides one such example...

...Several other important conduits for progressive ideas helped to bring European and American intellectuals into "a common frame" of cosmopolitan discourse, what Rodgers calls "the Atlantic progressive connection...

...Social insurance, the crowning achievement of Bismarck's antisocialist project of the 1880s," Rodgers wryly notes, ". . . was reframed in America as a socialist demand...

...If the former is true, Rodgers has not escaped Hartzian exceptionalism...

...In fact, as Rodgers shows in the case of social insurance debates, similar ideological positions, both for and against progressive reforms, existed on both sides of the Atlantic...

...These reformers, policy intellectuals often lacking firm institutional attachments to either the university or the state, were the "cosmopolitan progressives" who brokered "the Atlantic era in social politics...

...Democracy in form," states Rodgers succinctly, "inhibited democracy of services...

...If American progressive ideas derived from European sources, progressive policies themselves assumed a uniquely American cast in their passage from European to American contexts...

...Timing, Rodgers argues, was everything...

...The American example, for better or worse, reigns supreme...

...By making progressive intellectuals its focus, Atlantic Crossings embraces a highly unfashionable group...

...They agree that the United States has proved inhospitable to social democracy...

...Therein lies Rodgers's central challenge to prevailing interpretations of American progressive politics: his argument that reform was a European import, not a wholly indigenous creation...

...Scholars traded ideas through international conferences and journals of progressive opinion...

...World War I stirred up irrational sentiment against progressive policies with the taint of foreign (particularly German) provenance...

...THE BOOK'S thesis itself is a thing of considerable dexterity, a rare combination of clarity and complexity...

...Sometimes Rodgers blames the "legislative endgame" for the distortion of progressive policies...

...Conversely, European policies advancing collectivist values, once transplanted in America, often served commercial interests...

...Resistance to laissez-faire capitalism mounted first in Germany and England, where an industrial economy evolved earliest and hence where its severest effects were first felt...

...Bureau of Labor sponsored comparative investigations of European labor conditions and social policies...

...It was this Lockean liberal consensus that doomed any and all attempts to socialize the American state...

...And with the collapse of communist governments and the erosion of support for social democracy across the globe, it is hard to dispute the force of the newly invigorated American faith in free government and free markets...

...Theirs was an education as much practical as theoretical...

...the U.S...

...As today's Atlantic crossings go largely in the other direction, Rodgers forces us to ask whether the ideological freight we are exporting measures up to the goods we, but a century ago, once received...

...Rather than limiting his scope to Americanborn progressives, Rodgers opens up his study to include the vast network of cosmopolitan intellectuals responsible for the formation of progressive policies in Germany, England, France, Australia, and Sweden...

...If America radically altered or rejected European progressive policies, it was not because of a fundamental ideological difference but because of contingent social and political arrangements that made progressive ideas, entertained by both Europeans and Americans, more congenial to the European than to the American context...

...as Rodgers observes, "politically and socially the United States exhibited a case of arrested national development...

...To understand American progressivism, Rodgers boldly insists, one must comprehend the transatlantic world of ideas and political experimentation that helped shape it...

...ATLANTIC CROSSINGS: SOCIAL POLITICS IN A PROGRESSIVE AGE by Daniel Rodgers Harvard University Press, 1998 508 pp $35 IT is one of the oldest and most cherished of American conceits that the United States of America possesses a unique and privileged position among nations...

...Indeed, the book's scholarly virtues are, at times, vices for the generally educated reader...