JGF: Your 1998 book, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, retraces the histories of several countries as they transition from the predominance of private enterprise in essential services such as water, gas, transportation, and housing; the limited regulatory capacity of municipal and national governments; the dominance of laissez-faire ideology; and the reliance on small and fragmented voluntary associations towards an expanded role for the state in social and economic life.
Can you describe the period before the start of the ‘progressive era’?
DTR: You could describe it in three ways. First, it's the age of liberated capital, when capital first breaks loose from the state’s direction. This happens in the UK, in the United States, and across most of the industrialised world. Capital also breaks loose from the mercantile pursuits that were so important in the eighteenth century. It’s the age of industrial capitalism; the factory is the symbol of the new, private, unleashed enterprise.
It's secondly an age in which a new social utopia comes into being, an idea which we associate with Adam Smith, though he's not the only one who speaks in this way – that the best of all possible worlds is not made by designs from above but by allowing people to pursue their own self-interests. We all know the famous Adam Smith quote: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Self-interest is the key to progress. Setting it loose, we get the best of all practically possible worlds.
But then thirdly, it's also the age of Charles Dickens, its optimism undercut by a counter-sense that the new social and economic order is cruel, built across an ever-growing chasm between the newly rich and the new urban poor; that it's full of exploitation; that it’s a dystopia of a radically new sort. Dickens had no answer to the nightmares he recognised except kindness. In some ways, those whom we call progressives took that fear and urgency and tried to go beyond kindness.
JGF: How does the nature of the urban poor differ in places like Germany, Britain, and the United States?
DTR: They were all part of a strongly connected social-economic family. The United States in this era was a recipient of massive German, English, Irish, and Scottish immigration. British investment flowed abundantly into American enterprises. In these and other ways, the Atlantic economy was fundamentally transnational. But there were important differences between these three nations. A key distinction in this period was the structure of US law. Starting in the early part of the nineteenth century, American jurists began to invent something they call ‘freedom of contract’ – a constitutional principle of expansive scope and power. When states began to regulate the hours of labour by statute on the British model, American courts overturned most of their work on the grounds that individual workers and their employers must be free to enter employment contracts on whatever terms they choose. On similar grounds, regulation of railroad and public utility rates was much slower to take hold in the US than in Britain or Germany. These and many more like it were court-made decisions, issued with a constitutional authority foreign to other legal systems in the Atlantic world.
The US state didn't completely withdraw from the social realm. Nor did “progressives” seek to employ the state only for aims we would now call progressive. Many of the people who endeavoured to bring the economy under greater public control were the same people who enforced racial segregation in the US, using the state and its police powers to achieve it. Some of them, like Theodore Roosevelt, were imperialists to the core, as were almost all their analogues in Germany.
JGF: It's also an age of imperialism in military terms as much as the market breaking loose.
DTR: Yes, and in many cases the imperial territory became not only a field of exploitation but also a social laboratory where you could work out some of the social experiments that were not easily instituted at home.
JGF: Within the field of social reform, the book explores the innovations of the progressive era – such as city planning, public housing, co-operatives, and social insurance – as political parties, socialist organisations, think tanks, and the wider labour movement seek to build more economic and political power for working people.
Can you explain how certain innovations started in particular countries, how they spread to other places, and the difficulties faced by social reformers as they tried to get them adopted in different times, legislatures, markets, and cultures?
DTR: Of course, there were enormous obstacles to innovation everywhere. As measures move through different hands, they're used for different purposes, and their political valence changes dramatically. One of the clearest examples is social insurance. It begins in Otto von Bismarck's attempt to bring the German working class into deeper bonds of political loyalty and gratitude to the new German Empire. State-initiated health, old-age, and unemployment insurance began as top-down imperial propositions. But they don't stay that way. A generation later social insurance’s core ideas were adopted by British Liberals – not by the working class yet, which viewed it warily, but by the New Liberals who gained parliamentary power in the early part of the twentieth century. Social insurance finally comes to the United States with the 1930s New Deal, this time with some key labour backing. Despite all the differences in political culture, variations on the social insurance idea could be reworked to fit a multitude of different needs: Bismarck’s need for a patriotic working class, British Liberals’ sense of a general movement in society that needed to be addressed, and Franklin Roosevelt’s need to address the decade’s collapse of household economic security.
The main obstacle everywhere is that the field of innovation is never empty. Doctors mounted a very strong case against public health insurance. The existing commercial insurance companies wanted a cut of the deal. These pressures have resurfaced time and again, most recently to shape the very cautious public health insurance schemes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Those who find their field of action most threatened by state intervention lead resistance everywhere. But there are others who are on the fence. I think it's fair to say that socialists have had a hard time believing in the adequacy of these piecemeal reforms: social insurance, co-operative housing, the settlement house movement, and the like. To revolutionary socialists, schemes such as these were outright obstacles to serious change. But slowly those travelling social policy measures took hold in Britain, Germany, the US, and then finally throughout most of the industrialised world.
JGF: In the book, when you talk about associational life in the United States, you make the point that the issue is not the density and number of mutual aid societies, associations, and civil life delivering lots of different essential services outside of both state and market, but how sectarian it is; how you've got so many different religious groups, fraternal groups, racial groups, et cetera. That fragmentation prevents building a larger collective coalition that can go on to secure these rights at the national level. Can you talk a bit more about that US life – how much of an impact did that have, and does it still have, on the ability of the United States as a nation to achieve the kind of social innovations that you talk about in the book?
DTR: Well, I think it's something of a myth to talk about the uniformity of any of the national cultures in Europe. Germany is full of geographic, religious, and cultural divisions from north to south. Prussia was not even in the same nation as Bavaria in the middle of the nineteenth century, of course, either culturally or politically. Even now, the German social insurance system is administered largely through private, philanthropic agencies – something that would be unheard of in the United States. Inner diversity cuts both ways. At times, the federalism of the American system was an advantage for the reformers. They could do things in Wisconsin, North Carolina, or New York that they could not possibly do in Alabama. There was a lot of experimentation and considerable transfer of innovations among the American states before the New Deal, when the force of the nation began to be called upon to address many of these issues.
JGF: During this progressive era, social reformers were focused largely on improving or emancipating work and the worker. In Britain, at least, there were roles for trade unions, a parliamentary party, the co-operative movement, and workers' education. But, today, it seems that progressives have lost their connection to working people, are more likely to focus on place-based regeneration, and are largely employed by charities, not associations or unions.
How do you understand the changes in progressive politics – and the wider political economy – between the first age and now?
DTR: Well, it's a huge question and an important one. What developed in early twentieth-century Britain is really quite distinct; I don't know of any other country in which workers' education was as high on the priority of labour unions. It was certainly not in the United States for various reasons. It would have been a massive undertaking by an immigrant working class who never all spoke the same language. There has also never been an influential labour party in the United States to facilitate such a programme. The Democratic Party until well after the 1960s was simultaneously the party of the immigrant working class and Southern white racists. That's a really distinctive aspect of American social politics, and it meant that the limits on what progressives could politically accomplish were very tightly circumscribed. There is a wonderfully illuminating history of the New Deal by Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself, that underscores the influence of Southern white racists in shaping what was conceivable for a Democratic administration to do in the 1930s. That constraint was only ended when Richard Nixon, abandoning the Republican Party’s century-long Civil War heritage, remade his party as the ally of Southern white voters, finally leaving the Democratic Party to develop a more progressive stance than it had before.
The second thing I would say is that the percentage of the workforce enrolled in labour unions, or labour ‘density’, as it’s termed, is not constant. It's very, very small in the nineteenth century; it grows rapidly in the twentieth century, sometimes with state support, and it is now on the decline everywhere. I don't know how enduring the twentieth-century connection between the progressive politics and the labour movement is going to be anywhere in the Atlantic economy. Finally, in the US at least, the historical cleavage within the labour movement has played a crucial role in limiting its cultural and political force. Industrial unions, which organised factory workers across an entire industry like steel or coal, were in fierce competition with the skilled workers’ unions in the middle years of the twentieth century. Samuel Gompers, speaking for the craft unions, was very close to many of the Gilded Age types in believing that labour needed to chart its own course, use its power over those parts of the economy where skill gave it a foothold, and leave politics alone. Only in the ranks of the industrial unions have you ever had the kind of progressive-labour alliance you’re familiar with in Britain.
JGF: As you’ve mentioned, one area that has changed dramatically is the level of participation in civil society. In my view, it is not simply a lack of time; it's a lack of control over time – employer-friendly, flexible hours, and zero-hour contracts mean people have less control over their time. And this is why the conversation about the transformation of politics, the economy, and civil society can't happen in isolation. They influence one another so much.
DTR: One of the issues we’ve come back to in many ways in this conversation is the one you raise again here: how do you simultaneously act to strengthen the voluntaristic muscles of civil society and, at the same time, strengthen the social competence and powers of the state? The question itself is a legacy of these earlier progressive movements. Many of the reformers whose work I followed in Atlantic Crossings were veterans of the settlement house movement – itself a travelling progressive institution. They believed in voluntary action. They were searching for ways to expand the possibilities of sociality in places where people had too little power and too few resources. How do you promote both solidarities and universalities? How do you encourage personal and local initiative and bring the resources of the wider state in? The progressives did not believe those issues had easy or singular answers. But even more so than in their own day, they thought they were supremely important.
JGF: This notion of how one uses their time to regularly commit to different collective institutions, whether it’s parent-teacher associations, trade unions, or political parties, is heavily compromised by the fact that many of those institutions have been failing to deliver for 40 to 50 years. Now, the more intuitive act is to invest in the self as the main key agent and institution of change. I'm sure there are instances where we can see exceptions, but it’s far more difficult for people to see value in committing their time and resources to organise through larger – democratic – institutions.
DTR: In the progressive period, there’s a strong sense of history’s massive presence. Time was moving the whole world, it seemed, through a massive, common social-economic transformation. The reformers we’ve been talking about saw themselves not as enemies to progress but as allies to the best aspects of it. They thought their efforts had history on their side. I think that confidence is much diminished in our present day. Those calling for a return to a world governed by private action want to reverse history’s course. Others find themselves simply overwhelmed by the scope of the problems they are impelled to address. It’s not as easy to think that one is on the cutting edge of progressive advance as it once was.
JGF: Looking to the near future, do you think the current rise of artificial intelligence (AI) will be anywhere as disruptive as the arrival of the industrial revolution?
DTR: Historians’ expertise is grounded in the past; they don’t have any better sense of the future than anyone else. But for what it’s worth, my own sense is that the world of work will be very unevenly affected by AI. There will certainly be massive replacement of human workers by AI-powered robots in some sectors. In others, old-fashioned human-powered and human-directed labour will be cheaper than the alternatives. In a few, AI may make things better. Doctors already used a primitive form of artificial intelligence. If they’re faced with a patient with unfamiliar symptoms, they don’t figure out the case and its cure with their own brains. They look it up in an online handbook. AI will give them the resources to do that even more quickly and accurately.
As for the social issues at the top of the enduring progressive agenda – affordable housing, better public transportation, less costly and more widely available childcare, lower food prices, fairer taxes on the wealthy, to take Zohran Mamdani’s list – it’s not clear to me that AI will affect any of them.
JGF: If a modern group of policymakers and scholars embarked on an international ‘Civic and Social Systems Tour’ – similar in spirit to the Institute of Educational Travel’s 1914 itinerary – what contemporary institutions, policies, and innovations around the world would they seek out today in order to understand how societies are addressing social welfare, governance, housing, labour, health, and community development?
DTR: It's a very interesting question. There’s a very active transnational network of humanitarian travel. I was struck by the number of my undergraduate students who had spent time in humanitarian work projects abroad. But policy-oriented, socially focused international tours are no longer a fixture of our current scene. That’s not because the issues that are at the centre of social politics now are no longer transnational, or because addressing them could not benefit immensely from the experiences of other nations. Perhaps the structures of the EU make exchange more common there than here. But in the US, even before Donald Trump’s isolationist policies descended on the scene, transnational policy discussions played very little role in public debate.
Every once in a while it's mentioned that other countries outside the United States are also debating refugee and immigration policies. The contemporary world’s volume of extra-legal immigration is an inflammatory political issue everywhere. But there are many valuable lessons that could be learnt from the best experiments addressing these issues. How do you put border limits in place on a globe in which borders are suddenly more porous than before? Are there assimilation policies or socialisation experiments that could serve as warnings or as models? How well do they balance individual rights and community imperatives? Such programmes are widespread, but in the United States you barely hear a word about any of this, anything beyond the trope of a massive strangers’ “invasion”.
What kind of regulation do states impose upon the information economy? Europe is quite different in its approaches than the United States. It's thought here to be dangerous for an intervening hand to try to sort out facts from fiction. That, Americans reflectively say, is what other people do. In fact, it’s what Americans do too, but they keep it at a distance and under wraps.
So I would send my tour to any one of those departments – affordable housing, environmental stewardship, income disparities, immigration, information – where they could see others address issues that have become particularly acute in the contemporary United States. There's a sense here that our current situation is simply a reflection of the ways in which capitalism works in our neoliberal age. Or that it’s a tragic consequence of American difference. But all of these are world-circling issues, and we’d come to much wiser resolutions if we thought of them that way.
JGF: So, these people come back from the tour. What is now the biggest task of progressives armed with a whole set of bold policy innovations and economic experiments? Does it then become a party political question? A question of social movements? What is going to be a vehicle for translating these ideas into practice?
DTR: Change of this sort takes social movements, for sure. Nothing happens without their force. It takes changes in political structures. It takes the continuous input of small non-state innovations. But – and this is my own bias as a historian – finding ourselves in a political and economic climate that is very akin to the middle of the nineteenth century, where neoliberalism reigns so forcefully, renewing a serious conversation about what states can do, and what state power can't do, is really important. Otherwise, nothing will happen. Small endeavours will come and they'll go. They are born all the time, in the United States as well as elsewhere.
But to get past the question that the progressives raised, which is how do you use the resources of state action, is very hard if you don't believe states can do anything except get in the way. That is what we hear now, flooding through the intellectual class. So I would do all the things that you mentioned to encourage social organisation and political action, but I would, if I were director of one of the big philanthropic funds that still thrive in the United States, look out for the authors who wanted to find a new rationale for the use of state power in a way that does not employ it as an opposition to civic action, to working-class-based action, to co-operation and mutuality, but as an ally.
Daniel T. Rodgers is Henry Charles Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He is the author of Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, the Bancroft Prize-winning Age of Fracture, and other books in the history of ideas, society, and politics.
