Many of those who read this blog are likely familiar with James Kloppenberg’s magisterial Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and America Thought, 1870-1920, from 1986. (If not, you can catch up with it via Andrew Hartman’s two-part retrospective on the book here and here.) Kloppenberg’s characterization of a disparate group of philosophers and political actors as belonging to a broad via media of social thought has been widely influential, and for good reason. Not only did that concept of the via media make sense of many individual facets of numerous significant thinkers not usually treated together, it Read more