Politics & Power Quote by Herbert Croly

Croly’s sentence is doing two things at once: flattering idealism while quietly disciplining it. “Fruitful promise” sounds generous and forward-looking, but it’s also a filter. Not every promise counts; only the kind yoked to “an ideal” deserves to be taken seriously. The phrasing turns aspiration into a kind of moral credential, suggesting that a life or a nation without an organizing ideal isn’t merely drifting - it’s barren.

The subtext is a Progressive Era wager: modern society is too complex to be steered by habit, local custom, or laissez-faire improvisation. Croly, a central architect of early 20th-century American progressivism (and a founding force behind The New Republic), wrote in a moment when industrial capitalism, mass immigration, labor unrest, and corporate consolidation made the older story of America - individual striving plus minimal state - feel inadequate. His “ideal” is not private fantasy; it’s a public purpose robust enough to justify collective action and, crucially, national coordination.

The line’s rhetorical trick is its scale shift. It pairs “any individual” with “any nation,” collapsing personal ethics and statecraft into the same psychological mechanism: you become what you commit to. That’s persuasive because it borrows the intimacy of self-help and applies it to politics, making civic ambition feel like character development.

There’s an edge here, too. By defining legitimacy through “an ideal,” Croly implies that politics without a guiding vision is just management - and that can be read as a warning against technocracy, or as a license for leaders to wrap power in lofty language and call it destiny.