A grande ilusão

•       The late 19^th-century progressive embrace of social-control doctrine thus represented a decisive intellectual break with classically liberal thought, in two ways.

•       (1) Most fundamentally, it reconceived how economic and social progress was obtained. 

–      No longer was progress seen as a gradual, evolutionary process arising naturally as the byproduct of voluntary exchange. 

–      Instead, reformers argued, progress would need to be planned and continuously directed – the new guarantor of economic progress would be the visible hand of expert-guided government.

•       (2) American progressives were profoundly, almost naively, optimistic about the efficacy of reform, and the scope for its application: reform could improve education, medicine, family life, government, the economy, even humanity itself – everything, as Jane Addams said, was amenable to improvement.