ABSTRACT
The politics of hope had no place for those who placed ideals above community, or the individual above society, and readily sacrificed even some of its own partisans when necessary. Concerned for universal principles rather than for politics or expediency, they sought to recognize the humanity of patently oppressed classes rather than compete with them. The syndrome of progressivism, then, meant first of all a feeling for expanding opportunities that might help an individual’s private ambitions and that would feed his dreams and generally serve the politics of hope. Common to earlier and later eras, then, were liberal assumptions that government interventions of particular kinds were necessary to prevent private power from overwhelming the needy and the uninformed. Tenets produced upright and even awesome figures in education, temperance, peace, literature, woman suffrage, religious liberalism, and a score of other areas including, most spectacularly, abolition.
