America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism, Ronald J. Pestritto

The America of the modern administrative state is not the America of the original Constitution. This transformation comes not only from the ordinary course of historical change and development, but from a radical, new philosophy of government that was imported into the American political tradition by the Progressives of the late nineteenth century. The new thinking about the principles of government—and open hostility to the American Constitution—led to a host of concrete changes in American political institutions. Our government today reflects these original Progressive innovations, even if they are often unrecognized as such because they have become ingrained in American political culture. This book shows the nature of these changes, both in principles and in the nuts and bolts of governing. It also shows how progressivism was at the root of critical developments in more recent American political history—how the New Deal, the liberalism of the 1960s, and today’s liberalism all departed from, yet remain indebted to, the original Progressives.

Dr. Ronald J. Pestritto is the Dean of the Graduate School, professor of Politics, and the Charles and Lucia Shipley Chair in the American Constitution at Hillsdale College.