This study recreates the intellectual climate and transatlantic setting of turn-of-the-century American reform. It examines the influence and meaning of German social thought and reform in the American Reform Movement prior to World War I.

The American Progressives used the German theories in order to develop and establish new concepts of reform and to base democracy on principles other than possessive individualism, utilitarian ethics, and market ideology that liberalism held in stock.
However, due to the war these reforms lost their radical character. In the end, the progressive quest for a broader sphere of public control, participatory models of reform, and social ethics yielded to the liberal model of regulation, business co-operation, and administrative efficiency, and to the moralistic agenda of prohibition and immigration control.