The Promise of American Life: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Promise of American Life, credited to Herbert Croly, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly. Read in English by progressingamerica The book is said to "offer a manifesto of Progressive beliefs" that "anticipated the transition from competitive to corporate capitalism and from limited government to the welfare state." By Croly’s death in 1930, only 7,500 copies of The Promise of American Life had been sold. Despite this, the book was immensely influential, even influencing Theodore Roosevelt to adopt the platform of The New Nationalism.

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Promise of American Life
• Author credits: Herbert Croly
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 54
• Listed recording duration: 18:33:31

Catalogue topics

• philosophy
• non-fiction

Opening tracks: first 24 of 54

1. 01 - What Is the Promise of American Life? — 16:01
2. 02 - How the Promise has been realized — 22:01
3. 03 - How the Promise is to be realized — 24:39
4. 04 - The Federalists and the Republicans — 27:22
5. 05 - Federalism and Republicanism as opponents — 19:01
6. 06 - Federalism and Republicanism as allies — 13:23
7. 07 - The Democrats and the Whigs — 7:48
8. 08 - The New National Democracy — 25:43
9. 09 - The Whig failure — 14:32
10. 10 - Slavery and American Nationality — 19:34
11. 11 - Slavery as a Democratic Institution — 21:12
12. 12 - Lincoln as more than an American — 25:14
13. 13 - The Contemporary Situation and Its Problems — 14:18
14. 14 - The Development of the Business Specialist — 28:05
15. 15 - The Development of the Political Specialist — 21:15
16. 16 - The Labor Union and the Democratic Tradition — 13:15
17. 17 - Government by Lawyers — 15:58
18. 18 - American Democracy and the Social Problem — 5:40
19. 19 - Reform and the Reformers — 17:22
20. 20 - The Logic of Reform — 16:59
21. 21 - William J. Bryan as a Reformer — 14:06
22. 22 - William Travers Jerome as a Reformer — 9:03
23. 23 - William R. Hearst as a Reformer — 9:15
24. 24 - Theodore Roosevelt as a Reformer — 12:33

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.