5. THE POPULIST CAMPAIGN AGAINST "IMPROVEMENT" The Current Prospect: Progress or Catastrophe? 168 The Discovery of Civic Humanism 170 The Civic Tradition in Recent Historical Writing 172 Tom Paine: Liberal or Republican? 177 William Cobbett and the "Paper System " 181 Orestes Brownson and the Divorce between Politics and Religion 184 Brownson's Attack on Philanthropy 189 Lockean Liberalism: A "Bourgeois" Ideology? 195 Early Opposition to Wage Labor 203 Acceptance of Wage Labor and Its Implications 206 The New Labor History and the Rediscovery of the Artisan 209 Artisans against Innovation 212 Agrarian Populism: The Producer's Last Stand 217 The Essence of Nineteenth-Century Populism 221 6. "NO ANSWER BUT AN ECHO": THE WORLD WITHOUT WONDER Carlyle's Clothes Philosophy 226 Calvinism as Social Criticism 230 Puritan Virtue 233 "The Healthy Know Not of Their Health" 236 Carlyle and the Prophetic Tradition 239 Political and Literary Misreadings of Carlyle 240 Emerson in His Contemporaries' Eyes: Stoic and "Seer" 243 The Puritan Background of Emerson 's Thought: Jonathan Edwards and the Theology of "Consent" 246 Edwards on True Virtue 251 The "Moral Argument" against Calvinism 256 Emerson on Fate 261 "Compensation ": The Theology of Producerism 265 Emerson as a Populist 270 Virtue, the "True Fire" 274 Virtue in Search of a Calling 277 The Eclipse of Idealism in the Gilded Age 279 William James: The Last Puritan? 282 The Philosophy of Wonder 284 Art and Science: New Religions 286 -9-