a general increase of wealth. There was no foreseeable end to the transformation of luxuries into necessities. The more comforts people enjoyed, the more they would expect. The elasticity of demand appeared to give the Anglo-American idea of progress a solid foundation that could not be shaken by subsequent events, not even by the global wars that broke out in the twentieth century. Those wars, indeed, gave added energy to economic development.

The assumption that our standard of living (in the broadest meaning of that term) will undergo a steady improvement colors our view of the past as well as our view of the future. It gives rise to a nostalgic yearning for bygone simplicity—the other side of the ideology of progress. Nostalgia, not to be equated simply with the remembrance of things past, is better understood as an abdication of memory. It makes the past a foreign country, as David Lowenthal puts it. It obscures the connections between the past and the present. Deeply embedded both in popular culture and in academic sociology, the nostalgic attitude tends to replace historical analysis with abstract typologies—"traditional" and "modern" society, gemeinschaft and gesellschaft—that interfere with an imaginative reconstruction of our past or a sober assessment of our prospects. Now that we have begun to understand the environmental limits to economic growth, we need to subject the idea of progress to searching criticism; but a nostalgic view of the past does not provide the materials for that criticism. It gives us only a mirror image of progress, a one-dimensional view of history in which a wistful pessimism and a kind of fatalistic optimism are the only points of reference, a criticism of progress that depends on the contrast between complex modern societies and the close-knit communities allegedly typical of the "world we have lost," as Peter Laslett calls it in his study of seventeenth-century England.

The idea of progress and the communitarian counterpoint that accompanies it encourage a type of speculation that seeks to balance the gains of progress against losses and remains understandably ambivalent about the whole business. What is needed is a point of view that cuts through this inconclusive debate, calls the dominant categories into question, and enables us to understand the difference between nostalgia and memory, optimism and hope. A growing dissatisfaction with the prevailing point of view has led historians and social critics to investigate the Atlantic tradition of republicanism or civic humanism, historically an important

-14-