The Progressive Era saw a blending of the traditional Protestant moralism of American political thought with the modern technocratic frame of minda characteristic of modern social science. Scientism and moralism were to ride hand in hand, awkwardly but joyfully, upon pragmatism. ‘As the philosophy of Spencer’, Richard Hofstadter writes, ‘had reigned supreme in the great age of enterprise, so pragmatism, which rapidly became the dominant American philosophy in the two decades after 1900, breathed the spirit of the Progressive Era.’1 And to George Santayana, the pragmatism of Dewey was ‘the devoted spokesman of the spirit of enterprise, of experiment, of modern industry . . . calculated to justify all the assumptions of American society’.2