The dreadful section of the dissertation is finally done!  Well, at least the hard part of it; I have some cosmetic work that needs to be done.  I finally completed the substantive work on the literature review I had to write for Chapter Three in order to demonstrate the intellectual poverty of almost the entire corpus of historical writings on the Progressive movement up to this point.  I may be biased -- although a bias towards truth is no sin in my view -- but hardly anything worth a damn has been written about the Progressives aside from a handful of works by political theorists!  Eldon Eisenach's The Lost Promise of Progressivism, Steve Hayward's unpublished doctoral dissertation The Decline and Revival of Laissez Faire in the American Mind: An Outline of the Odyssey of Progressivism in Law, Economics, and Political Philosophy, and Charles Kesler's essay "Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Progress" (that last is less important substantively than the other two, but there is a single sentence in Charles' essay that gave me the idea for my dissertation -- perhaps I show my bias again?).  What is the common denominator of these three?  Yep, they are political scientists with a specialty in political theory.

Tomorrow I shall go through the stuff I just finished and beef it up a bit with comments from some of the review essays I have, fix the footnotes that I just roughed in, etc.  But the thing is substantively done, and now it's time to research one of the fun parts of the dissertation -- how the historicism of the Progressives united them in their attack on the natural-right foundation of American constitutionalism.  I'm delighted!  And tired.  And wide awake.  All at once. 

And I managed to scratch every last thing off of my task list for today.   Not a bad day's effort at all.

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