1. The classic liberal society of participatory institutions, competitive markets, and social mobility, which formerly nurtured and sustained the American belief in individual freedom and opportunity along with popular self-rule, is today scarcely a memory. In its place, the corporate organization of society—expanding for 150 years with its encompassing hierarchies and concentrations of power—recast American society and its popular practices and expectations. Amid the unending acceleration of production and technological innovation, omnipresent merchandisers and round-the-clock digital stimulants cajole and persuade individuals to pursue unprecedented enticements: indulgence in limitless appetitive striving and the pseudo-celebrity of ceaseless self-inflation. Facing an ever more constricting social reality and temptations ever less compatible with the core liberal virtues of moderation and self-restraint, Americans may wonder what is still liberal about their axiomatically liberal society. If the answer is cautionary, where does this leave us? And what options do we have?
2. Growing secularism in the last decades of the nineteenth century was attended by the waning of Protestant religiosity. The resulting emergence of a liberal polity, as conceptualized by John Dewey, the leading thinker of the age, involved a transfer of ultimate authority over the nation’s common ends from Divinity to Society. Accompanying this transition was a shift in the nature of the human role in the world: In place of the Protestant “freedom” to serve God and the godly plan in the way of one’s choosing, so long as authoritatively sanctioned, “freedom” was reconstituted to mesh with liberal precepts. Defined now as members primarily of society, individuals could serve in the ways of their choosing so long as they were within the constraints of liberal ends and norms, as well as designated social practices.
3. The increasingly liberal polity initially extended the nineteenth-century ideal of a culture of democratic, civic, and political participation to the modern era of growing industrialism and urbanism. The corporate sector, a core element of an expanding private and public organizational society, became steadily more dominant as late-century liberalism faced a dilemma: The far-reaching success of the American economy was regarded by industrial and business elites as the realization of organizational priorities advanced through economies of scale and implemented by coordinated planning and administrative hierarchies. At the same time, the era’s mass political movements, including militant labor unions, the Socialist Party, and the Social Gospel movement, driven to demand greater public oversight to contain expanding corporate economic and political power, were seen as an acute threat to systemic efficiency and managerial supervision. This led to a concerted reallocation of political and economic power by private elites and public administrators: Systemic control and decision-making—regarding not only public matters but inevitably, given their broader impact, individual choices as well—shifted from a democratic electoral process to elite administrative bodies and private ownership.