Progressivism’s Forgotten Roots

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. 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.

Recent events have lent new credibility to this old boast. In the international power vacuum created by the dissolution ...