Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era

The pivotal and troubling role of progressive-era economics in the shaping of modern American liberalism

In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. ...