The Promise of American Lives - Heroic Individualism in the Writings of Herbert Croly
Kevin C. Murphy,Columbia University
Kevin C. Murphy,
Still, the question remains – if the nation is not the gardener but instead the fertile soil, what then brings on this flowering of diverse democratic individuality? Croly’s answer: aspiration itself. “The truth is that individuality cannot be dissociated from the pursuit of a disinterested object,” he writes. “It is a moral and intellectual quality, and it must be realized by moral and intellectual means. A man achieves individual distinction, not by the enterprise and vigor with which he accumulates money, but by the zeal and the skill with which he pursues an exclusive interest – an interest usually, but not necessarily connected with his means of livelihood.”20 Thus, concludes Croly, a person cultivates her own individuality by freely engaging in an aesthetic or occupational pursuit of her choosing, and the best form of government is one that offers a diversity of pursuits for such citizens to engage in.
In defining individuality thus, Croly acknowledges his intellectual debt to the writings of nineteenth century British cultural critics John Ruskin and William Morris, both of whom extolled “the insistence on the worker’s right to joyful and useful labor” as the “moral core” of their public philosophies. As historian T.J. Jackson Lears
argues in his seminal work No Place of Grace, both Ruskin’s medievalist-centered appraisal of modern life and Morris’s socialist-leaning update of Ruskin’s thesis emphasize the critical importance of artisanal creation to the happiness of the individual. Similarly, both lament the “degradation of work” as the primary flaw in the organization of modern economic life. According to Lears, these antimodern arguments of Ruskin and Morris influenced a generation of American intellectuals and progressives, who in “yearning to reintegrate selfhood by resurrecting the authentic experience of manual labor…looked hopefully toward the figure of the premodern artisan.”21Yet, Lears argues, the national predisposition toward progress caused American heirs of Ruskin and Morris, ranging from the wide-ranging thinkers of the Arts and Crafts Movement to the progressive founders of the Settlement Houses, to jettison the antimodernist component of their critiques and instead make peace with the emerging bureaucratic-industrial order. As American reformers “began unwittingly to accommodate themselves to the corporate system of organized capitalism,” remarks Lears, “their focus began to shift from social justice to personal fulfillment.” […]
Despite the much-heralded emphasis on nationalism throughout Promise of American Life
, the central argument of Croly’s tome – the motive force that spurs his progressive vision of the ideal polity -- rests primarily in the hands of exemplary individuals.26 Indeed, the only way that the “noble and civilized democracy” which Croly has spent the entire book articulating can come to pass is if America
In placing so much rhetorical weight upon the idea of heroism, Croly’s Promise enters into a dialogue with a number of intriguing canons, and none so obvious as that of his early progressive contemporaries. Historians as diverse as James Higham
, T.J. Jackson Lears, George Cotkin
, and Gail Bederman
have all noted the cultural veneration of the heroic ideal at the turn of the twentieth century. As Cotkin puts it in his study of William James
’ own embrace of this heroic ideal, the “discourse of heroism…enthused American culture after 1880” and had “transformed itself into a full-fledged revitalization movement” soon thereafter. Be it in Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur, the dime novel adventures of Deadwood Dick, the sculling paintings of Thomas Eakins, the Muscular Christianity of Dwight Moody, the virile public image of Theodore Roosevelt, or the “capacity of the strenuous mood” idealized by William James, the discourse of heroism was omnipresent among the thinkers of Herbert Croly’s generation, and as such Promise falls clearly within the cultural mainstream of its time.27
, the central argument of Croly’s tome – the motive force that spurs his progressive vision of the ideal polity -- rests primarily in the hands of exemplary individuals.26 Indeed, the only way that the “noble and civilized democracy” which Croly has spent the entire book articulating can come to pass is if In placing so much rhetorical weight upon the idea of heroism, Croly’s Promise enters into a dialogue with a number of intriguing canons, and none so obvious as that of his early progressive contemporaries. Historians as diverse as James Higham
, T.J. Jackson Lears, George Cotkin, and Gail Bederman have all noted the cultural veneration of the heroic ideal at the turn of the twentieth century. As Cotkin puts it in his study of William James’ own embrace of this heroic ideal, the “discourse of heroism…enthused American culture after 1880” and had “transformed itself into a full-fledged revitalization movement” soon thereafter. Be it in Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur, the dime novel adventures of Deadwood Dick, the sculling paintings of Thomas Eakins, the Muscular Christianity of Dwight Moody, the virile public image of Theodore Roosevelt, or the “capacity of the strenuous mood” idealized by William James, the discourse of heroism was omnipresent among the thinkers of Herbert Croly’s generation, and as such Promise falls clearly within the cultural mainstream of its time.27 Yet Croly’s use of heroic exemplars also speaks to longer-standing traditions in the American mind. For one, although it may at first seem counterintuitive given both Croly’s contempt for Jeffersonian provincialism and his arguments in favor of political centralization, the emphasis on democratic improvement through heroic emulation place Promise squarely in the civic republican tradition. In the words of political scientist Michael Sandel, “the republican conception of freedom…requires a formative politics, a politics that cultivates in citizens the qualities of character self-government requires.” And this type of formative politics is clearly at the center of Croly’s tome. As Sandel notes, “repeatedly and explicitly, Croly wrote of the ‘formative purpose’ of democratic life. More than a scheme for majority rule or individual liberty or equal rights, [Croly’s] democracy has as its highest purpose the moral and civic improvements of the people…the point of democracy [for Croly] was not to cater to people’s desires but to elevate their character, broaden their sympathies, and enlarge their civic spirit.”28
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: a galaxy of front ranking patriots spanning the whole gamut of political spectrum have acknowledged their debt to 
, in contrast to August Comte's depiction of the evolution of ...
acknowledged the influence of English utilitarianism and French positivism on his political thought but asserted all the same his independence of them by critiquing them where they, in his opinion, deserved such criticism… Bankimchandra took Auguste Comte’s prescription, as offered in the latter’s philosophy of positivism, that the ‘human deity’ be worshipped, but did not take Comte’s reasons for such prescription. Comte argued that since God could not be seen but only imagined and that since He was extra-cosmic and superior to humanity, man should devote himself rather to the worship of concrete humanity than an abstract God. Unlike Comte, Bankimchandra did not want to make a distinction between abstract God and concrete humanity. He wished to combine the abstract and the concrete by observing that God was the inmost essence of all human beings and that ‘worship’ of the one was worship of the other as well. Having made God and humanity one, 
a next observed that the dharma of man lay in his attainment of full humanity through the cultivation and harmonious development (anushilan, as he termed it) of all his physical and mental faculties as also through the performance of dutiful actions in the selfless spirit of Krishna, who, in Bankimchandra’s opinion, represented the best example of full humanity in respect of both being and doing. Bankimchandra then went on to assert that man attained his full ‘maturity’ when, having developed himself after the anushilan dharma, he directed his devotion to God. God was in all beings. Therefore, devotion to God meant progressively extending one’s love for oneself and one’s family to one’s community to one’s country and finally to whole of humanity or the entire human race. Love for the whole humanity, however, was an ideal very difficult to realize in actual practice and so Bankimchandra advised his countrymen to take love for one’s country as the highest religion. As he put it, ‘Considering the condition of mankind, love of one’s own country should be called the highest dharma’ (199). ..... Sri Aurobindo’s Bhavani Mandir was clearly a product of the inspiration he received from Bankimchandra’s Ananda Math. And that Bankimchandra inspired many revolutionaries of 
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the invocation to sanatan dharma by Aurobindo is deeply troubling and makes him implicitly, if not explicitly, the harbinger of communalism in the pejorative sense the term came to acquire some two decades after Aurobindo had retired from active political life.4 To an anti-secularist scholar like 
the “nationalist passions” of Aurobindo located in “a theory of transcendence” are mistakenly deemed to be too narrowly conceived compared to the broader humanism of the more universalist, civilizational discourses ascribed to Tagore and Gandhi.5 The specific failures in fathoming the depths of Aurobindo’s thought are related to more general infirmities that have afflicted the history of political and economic ideas in colonial India…
writes somewhat derisively, “the revolutionary leader becomes the yogi of 
. He held that Cosmopolitan Right, the basic right of all world citizens, should rest on conditions of universal hospitality, that is, the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory. In other words, we should be free to go wherever we like in the world, since it belongs to all of us equally. The contrast with our routine experience of international travel today could not be more marked. He says, 
’s revolutionary pamphlet that launched the American war of independence, was generated in everyday life, in shared social experience (good food, good talk, good company). Earlier he wrote an essay, “Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose”, which included these propositions:
wrote recently that “Humanity…is that part of the world through which the world as a whole can think about itself”, he was repeating the central idea of Kant’s prescient essay. The task of building a global civil society for the 21st century is urgent and anthropological visions must play their part in that.
contains the programmes of all three founding fathers of modern social theory (Marx, Weber, Durkheim) rolled into one. This counter-revolution was only truly consummated after the first world war. The result was a separation of the personal from the impersonal, the subject from the object, humanism from science. It was enshrined in the academic division of labour and it is why most people have never heard of Kant’s seminal contribution to anthropology. This is the split that the decline of national capitalism in the face of the digital revolution might allow us to reverse. In 
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