truth, which the competition for power undermines."

Croly's point—a Niebuhrian point, though neither he nor Niebuhr recognized it as such—was not that "competition for power" should be somehow proscribed but that it would not, in itself, lead to "truth." Far from disparaging the struggle for power, Croly upheld it as the only way "a nation learns to know its own mind." To those who criticized the New Republic in the twenties for its failure to put forward a concrete program for social change, he replied that programs had to come from "political, social or occupational groups" seeking to advance "common interests," not from liberal intellectuals. "One of the ways in which a people exhibits moral initiative and develops its aptitude for self-government is by giving birth to projects of this kind." The "clash," "comparison," and "revision" of "group programs" provided an "indispensable and abundant source of political and social education." Conflicting programs and purposes supplied the "medium in which the customary conduct and ideas of a people are tested, adjusted, modified and transcended." Those who fought for them, however, inevitably took a partial view of things. They regarded their own purposes as "all-sufficient." Embattled groups seldom conceived of political agitation as an "experimental activity which is to be tested by its results."

The job of intellectuals was to call attention to this partiality of collective purposes (this egoism of groups, as Niebuhr would have put it) and to encourage "self-watchfulness on the part of those people whose lives are dedicated to imposing their own ways and ideas upon other people." The labor movement would become self-righteous and "destructively pugnacious" without the critical support of liberal intellectuals. Croly did not mean that intellectuals should try to mediate among contending interests or that they alone, from a position above the battle, could speak for society's common purposes. Common purposes would emerge only from the competition among rival interests. Unless that competition was disciplined by "self-watchfulness," however, ideas would become "merely rationalizations of interests or of activities." Programs were not just instruments by means of which groups sought to achieve their particular ends; they were also instruments societies employed "to make up their minds." The overriding end of political action, moreover, was to "transform political activities" into "schools" of "character, discrimination and judgment" for the "virtuous social actor." "The ultimate value to civilization

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