competitor of the liberal tradition. Scholars have shown that the political economy of liberalism came to prevail only against vigorous opposition, that its eventual triumph was far from a foregone conclusion, and that the republican tradition continued, well into the nineteenth century, to hold up an ideal of the good society radically different from the one held up by liberalism.

My discussion of nineteenth-century populism or proprietary democracy—broadly understood as a body of social thought that condemned the boundless appetite for more and better goods and distrusted "improvements" if they only gave rise to a more and more elaborate division of labor—builds on the work of J. G. A. Pocock, Gordon Wood, and other historians of the republican tradition. It is my contention, however, that the concept of virtue, which played such an important part in the nineteenth-century critique of "improvement," did not derive from republican sources alone. Recent scholarship, much of it inspired by the hope of reviving a sense of civic obligation and of countering the acquisitive individualism fostered by liberalism, has overlooked the more vigorous concept of virtue that was articulated in certain varieties of radical Protestantism. For a Puritan like John Milton, "virtue" referred not to the disinterested service of the public good but to the courage, vitality, and life-giving force emanating, in the last analysis, from the creator of the universe. Milton associated virtue both with the blessings conferred on mankind by God and with the grateful recognition of life as a gift rather than a challenge to our power to shape it to our own purposes. Jonathan Edwards likewise understood that gratitude implied a recognition of man's dependence on a higher power. For Edwards, ingratitude—the refusal to acknowledge limits on human powers, the wish to achieve godlike knowledge and capacities—became the antithesis of virtue and the essence of original sin.

In the nineteenth century, a time when the progress of human ingenuity seemed to promise a decisive victory over fate, Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, latter-day Calvinists without a Calvinist theology, reminded their readers that human beings did not control their own fate. They argued, in effect, that fate could be conquered only by "wonder" and virtue—by grateful acceptance of a world that was not made solely for human enjoyment. Their insistence on human limitations, it seems to me, had a good deal in common with the populist critique of

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