This essay reevaluates the work of Herbert Croly, a central figure in American progressivism. Croly contests the thesis that the liberal tradition in the United States is inhospitable to anticapitalist alternatives, drawing from the American past a history of resistance to capitalist wage relations that is fundamentally liberal. This historical reconstruction guides his departure from progressivism. Croly reclaims an idea Progressives allowed to lapse -- that working for wages is a lesser form of liberty. Increasingly sceptical of social welfare legislation (...) to remedy social ills, he argues that America's liberal promise can be redeemed only by syndicalist reforms involving workplace democracy. (shrink)

Marx counted the Greeks among his greatest teachers. The burden of contemporary scholarship is that Marx's debt to antiquity is principally a debt to Aristotle. Studies of the Aristotelian lineages of Marx's political thought have revealed significant aspects of his understanding of justice and the good life. Just as important, scholars have explored the connections between Aristotle's and Marx's writings on economics. On this view, underlying Capital is a normative ideal drawn mainly from Book 1 of Aristotle's Politics. The aim (...) of this essay is to challenge this reading of Marx. Although Marx learned much about the Greeks from Aristotle, his chief theoretical interest lay in the unique accomplishments of the Athenian demos, not in Aristotle's conception of the human good. (shrink)