nonviolent resistance. What these thinkers shared with each other and with their predecessors was a sense of limits—the unifying thread in the following narrative. An exploration of the idea of limits in various guises enables us to reconstruct not so much an intellectual tradition as a sensibility, one that runs against the dominant currents in modern life but exerts considerable force, even today.

It is most simply described, perhaps, as the sensibility of the petty bourgeoisie—difficult to recognize as such, in major thinkers, only because we expect major thinkers to participate in the general revulsion against the petty-bourgeois way of life. These particular thinkers, I believe, embodied the conscience of the lower middle class, giving voice to its distinctive concerns and criticizing its characteristic vices of envy, resentment, and servility. Notwithstanding those vices, the moral conservatism of the petty bourgeoisie, its egalitarianism, its respect for workmanship, its understanding of the value of loyalty, and its struggle against the moral temptation of resentment are the materials on which critics of progress have always had to rely if they wanted to put together a coherent challenge to the reigning orthodoxy.

I have no intention of minimizing the narrowness and provincialism of lower-middle-class culture; nor do I deny that it has produced racism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, and all the other evils so often cited by liberal critics. But liberals have lost sight of what is valuable in lower‐ middle-class culture in their eagerness to condemn what is objectionable. Their attack on "Middle America," which eventually gave rise to a counterattack against liberalism—the main ingredient in the rise of the new right—has blinded them to the positive features of petty-bourgeois culture: its moral realism, its understanding that everything has its price, its respect for limits, its skepticism about progress. Whatever can be said against them, small proprietors, artisans, tradesmen, and farmers—more often victims of "improvement" than beneficiaries—are unlikely to mistake the promised land of progress for the true and only heaven.

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