Herbert Croly is widely recognised as one of the principal architects of American ‘Progressivism’, yet his contribution to the intellectual foundations of American global power has received comparatively limited attention. This paper argues that Croly should be understood not only as a domestic political reformer but also as an important intellectual precursor of the worldview that would come to animate the United States' post-1945 hegemony. Through an analysis of The Promise of American Life (1909), Progressive Democracy (1914), The New Republic, and Croly's wartime writings, the paper examines how his vision of a strong, centralised national state became inseparable from a broader conception of American international leadership.
Croly rejected both nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberalism and traditional Jeffersonian individualism, advocating instead a Hamiltonian national state capable of promoting democratic purpose, social justice, and national efficiency. This domestic project also carried an international logic. As the United States emerged as a great power, Croly increasingly viewed American institutions and political values as possessing universal significance, legitimising a more active international role. His support for American intervention in the First World War and for the construction of a liberal international order reflected the belief that national progress and international responsibility were mutually reinforcing rather than contradictory.
Situating Croly within broader debates on liberal internationalism and American political development, the paper argues that his thought anticipated John Ikenberry’s description of the post-1945 United States as a "Liberal Leviathan" – i.e. a hegemon animated by the belief that its domestic political, economic and social order could be externalized in the service of international order and stability. Rather than treating American hegemony as a post-1945 innovation, the paper demonstrates that many of its core ideological assumptions were articulated decades earlier by Progressive intellectuals seeking to reconcile democracy, state capacity, and international activism.
By recovering Croly's international thought, the paper contributes to the intellectual history of American grand strategy and offers a new perspective on the enduring relationship between Progressivism, liberal internationalism, and American global hegemony.
