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This article surveys the history of Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune to explore the social unease and contradictory impulses that gave rise to an American liberal tradition. It was said that the Tribune was both an organ for Republican champions of bourgeois property rights and the most influential reform newspaper in the U.S. Some writers of the newspaper formulated a social democratic ideology that showed a profound ambivalence toward the spread of market individualism and industrial capitalism. The term social democracy was used to describe the expanse between Marxism and bourgeois liberalism, a discursive space where the New-York Tribune was an important popular participant. It was found that the Tribune's social democratic commitments were highly dynamic, even in the two decades prior to the Civil War.

The article highlights the concept of political economy coined by well-known socio-economist Horace Greeley. Historians of economic thought, in customarily appointing Henry C. Carey dean of the American School, have generally neglected the high spokesman of discontent, Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the "New York Tribune." Horace Greeley's life and political economy stand out as clearer expressions of a young America in its middle period transition. Greeley was an awakened figure of his time. Never the totally eccentric dreamer he is frequently considered, he found himself aware that narrow parochialisms were breaking up, and he aimed to conform society to the changes under way. He saw his country as the great chance for righting wrongs- and he wished to make it a proving ground for social experimentation. Thus, he devoted his life and his paper to teaching the people to seek freedom by building a wealthy nation in which resources should be correctly utilized and special privileges should be destroyed.