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Thus Dewey argued that we should recognize positive liberty as well as negative liberty, meaning that e.g. just as we ought to recognize a right to live without someone killing you, we similarly ought to recognize a right to live without dying due to lack of food. Thus American liberalism advocates that the government should play some role in the economy in order to give people autonomy and enable them to pursue their own happiness, along the lines of the "responsiveness" part of the Progressive philosophy. Thus Americans liberals still try to achieve the goals of classical liberalism, but they sometimes do it through Progressive means. (This is akin to how, as I discuss here, American conservatism tries to achieve the goals of traditionalism, but often through libertarian means.)

(I discuss the underpinnings of American conservatism here if you're interested.)

Thus Dewey argued that we should recognize positive liberty as well as negative liberty, meaning that e.g. just as we ought to recognize a right to live without someone killing you, we similarly ought to recognize a right to live without dying due to lack of food. Thus American liberalism advocates that the government should play some role in the economy in order to give people autonomy and enable them to pursue their own happiness, along the lines of the "responsiveness" part of the Progressive philosophy. Thus Americans liberals still try to achieve the goals of classical liberalism, but they sometimes do it through Progressive means. (This is akin to how, as I discuss here, American conservatism tries to achieve the goals of traditionalism, but often through libertarian means.)

(I discuss the underpinnings of American conservatism here if you're interested.)

In any case, when contemporary liberals call themselves progressive, their hearkening back to their intellectual predecessors.

In any case, when contemporary liberals call themselves progressive, they're hearkening back to their intellectual predecessors.

EDIT: Yuval Levin has just written a book which argues that the positive rights vision of liberalism originated not with Dewey in the early twentieth century as I suggested, but rather in the late 1700's with Thomas Paine, one of America's founding fathers. Levin argues that the modern American left-right divide originated in the debate in America and England over the French Revolution. Paine was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution, because he thought that government is an institution deliberately created by people to sageguard their individual liberty, and so it could be overthrown whenever the people thought it wasn't doing a good job. On the other hand, Edmund Burke, a predecessor to modern conservatism, saw government as an institution that grew organically as a tradition, and that we should be suspicious of making changes to it just because individuals in the current generation happen to object to it. In any case, Paine's philosophy of individualism led him to believe that an individual can only realize his full potential if he's not constrained by material want, so he believed in the government providing basic necessities to everyone. Thus, Levin argues, the early twentieth century Progressive movement was merely reinventing the wheel.