Croly explains the requirements for a genuinely popular system of representative government providing progressive liberalism with both a philosophical critique of the founding fathers' political outlook, and a political strategy for replacing it with something more in keeping with a new epoch. Although it was written in 1914, the intellectual structure remains largely intact within the liberal-progressive tradition.
Herbert David Croly (January 23, 1869 – May 17, 1930) was an intellectual leader of the progressive movement as an editor, political philosopher and a co-founder of the magazine The New Republic in early twentieth-century America. His political philosophy influenced many leading progressives including Theodore Roosevelt, Adolph Berle, as well as his close friends Judge Learned Hand and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.