Other socialists continued Marx’s utopian dream. Michael Harrington, for
example, one of the leading American socialists, saw the socialist vision as “the idea of
an utterly new society in which some of the fundamental limitations of human existence
have been transcended.” He predicted that there would be a “psychic mutation,” so that
“invidious competition is no longer programmed into life by the necessity of a struggle
for scarce resources,” and then “cooperation, fraternity, and equality become natural.”
He foresaw that “in the more distant future, it is not only possible but necessary for
society to enter the Kingdom of Freedom.”
Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life is one of the foundational
statements of American liberal progressivism. Croly claimed that a “religion of human
brotherhood” could be promoted through an active democratic government, and thus
“human nature can be raised to a higher level by an improvement in institutions and
laws.” His fundamental principle was that “democracy must stand or fall on a platform
of possible human perfectibility.”
American leftists such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
Richard Rorty, and E. J. Dionne have praised Croly as the founder of modern American
liberalism.
Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions surveys the history of ideological debate
over the past two centuries as showing a fundamental contrast between the “constrained
vision” and the “unconstrained vision,” which corresponds to my distinction between the
“realist vision” of the political right and the “utopian vision” of the political left.
Sowell’s analysis, those with the realist vision of life believe that since the moral and
intellectual limits of human beings are rooted in an unchanging human nature, a good
10
Michael Harrington, Socialism (New York: Bantam Books, 1973), 421, 452.
11
Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 207-208, 399-400.
12
Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (New York: Basic
Books, 2002).
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Convention