A philosophical history of American Progressivism

This work analyzes some of the major progressive movements in American history in order to understand the seeming lack of social progress in contemporary America. It begins by replacing the typical bivalent language (liberal/conservative, Left/Right, etc.) of contemporary parlance with a threefold distinction (metaphysics of person, political methodology, and social inclusion) that ends up dividing the universe of political discourse into eight positions instead of two. Then, it analyzes four important moments in the history of American progressivism (the American Revolution, the abolition of slavery, the early women's rights movement, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s) in terms of these eight categories, finding that two of these eight, relational conservative progressivism and relational liberal progressivism, were particularly influential to some of the major leaders of each movement. The work concludes by examining some influential thinkers in the contemporary political landscape (especially John Rawls, Richard Rorty, and Leo Strauss). The ways of thinking these latter figures advocate preclude both relational conservative progressivism and relational liberal progressivism. Thus, this work argues, insofar as our political discourse is defined in terms these later figures represent, two viewpoints that were central in many important moments in American social progress have become marginalized of late.