ABSTRACT
The new middle class set limits on feudal and royal power, generalizing rights against authority in order to claim privileges for themselves. The American and French declarations of natural right were the ideological reflection of the bourgeois revolution. Herbert Croly’s exposition of Hamiltonian ideas in The Promise of American Life gave Roosevelt’s neo-Hamiltonianism a dynamic intellectual setting. By 1910 the ex-President was declaring that “every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.” In 1912 he sought to bring this issue to sharp choice; he sought to make the Republican Party decide between property rights and “the general right of the community.” Capitalism could not defend itself by suppressing skeptics: it had to protect intellectuals in their right to criticism if it were going to preserve businessmen in their right to initiative.
