By using as a case study the intellectual biography of Boston reformer and editor Benjamin O. Flower (1858-1918) from the founding of his magazine, The Arena, in 1889 to his death, this dissertation explores the ambiguities of progressivism and revisits its “strange theoretical combinations,” to use historian Robert Wiebe’s phrase. Flower considered the corruption, the poverty and the moral bankruptcy that plagued turn-of-the-century America as physical and spiritual diseases – the nonconformist ideas of his time (populism, socialism, social experiments in the rest of the world, but also alternative medicine and spiritualities) illustrated the American spirit of freedom and could cure and regenerate individuals and society. Flower wanted his magazines, notably the aptly named Arena, to function as an open forum where ideas could be debated freely, thus bringing about a new « Great Awakening » and ensuring progress. At the end of his life, Flower grappled with the ambivalences of freedom. In the 1910s, he fought for “medical freedom,” struggling against the American Medical Association’s move to control alternative medicine and against the creation of a federal Department of Health. He also defended freedom of the press against postal censorship, which led him to work for an anti-Catholic newspaper during the Great War, The Menace. These controversies over the meaning of progress and freedom shed light on the cultural gaps which divided reformism and led to the advent of the modernization narrative and, as a result, to the relegation of antimonopoly progressivism to the margins of history.

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   |texte=   Benjamin Orange Flower and the ambiguities of progressivism (1889-1918) : individual freedom, meliorism and social remedies at the turn of the 20th century (1889-1918)
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