"improvement," even though it was couched in a philosophical rather than a political idiom. Emerson's principle of "compensation" can be understood as an exploration of the moral implications of "unearned increment." Defiance of fate, as Emerson saw it, amounted to a form of tax evasion, an attempt to get something for nothing—to escape the duty on desire. The political economists of progress hoped to unleash wealth‐ creating desire; Emerson and Carlyle reaffirmed the ancient folk wisdom according to which overweening desire invites retribution, the corrective, compensatory force of nemesis.

William James, in his penetrating analysis of the "twice-born" type of religious experience, explained the "admirable congruity of Protestant theology with the structure of the mind." For the twice-born, defeat and despair were only the prelude to the experience of hope and wonder, all the more intense because it rested on an awareness of tragedy. If James was more dubious about the moral wisdom of self-surrender than Emerson or Carlyle, he shared their belief that spiritual "desiccation," as he put it, posed a greater danger to the modern world than religious fanaticism, superstition, and intolerance—the "bogey" of those who believed that progress ought to enable man to outgrow his childish need for religion. By the beginning of the twentieth century, many others had come to be haunted by the misgivings about progress expressed so clearly by Carlyle, Emerson, and James. Thus Georges Sorel, who acknowledged intellectual indebtedness to James, conceived syndicalism not only as the moral equivalent of an earlier form of proprietorship but as the only form of political action that could sustain a heroic conception of life.

A number of recurring themes informed the kind of opposition to progressive ideology that I have tried to recover and to distinguish from a more familiar lament for the decline of "community." The habits of responsibility associated with property ownership; the self-forgetfulness that comes with immersion in some all-absorbing piece of work; the danger that material comforts will extinguish a more demanding ideal of the good life; the dependence of happiness on the recognition that humans are not made for happiness—these preoccupations, separately or in various combinations, reappeared in Sorel's version of syndicalism, in the guild socialism advocated by G. D. H. Cole and others, in Josiah Royce's "philosophy of loyalty," in Reinhold Niebuhr's account of the "spiritual discipline against resentment," and in Martin Luther King's practice of

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