itself in direct opposition to Christianity, accused by republicans of weakening civic loyalty by demanding exclusive loyalty to God, it is easy to miss their underlying affinity. Both encouraged men and women to find order and meaning in submission to a communal standard of conduct. Both associated the good life with a particular form of community and with the memories that constituted it. There was a world of difference, to be sure, between a community of saints and a community of virtuous citizens, but the two concepts, virtue and grace, "found common ground," in Pocock's words, "in an ideal of austerity and self-denial." The belief in progress carried with it a very different ideal of the good life.

Machiavelli's politicization of virtue, leading to the gradual assimilation of the idea of fortune to the newer idea of civic corruption, made historical processes more intelligible than before but no more amenable to a progressive interpretation. Once the "antithesis of virtue ceased to be fortuna [and] became corruption instead," the succession of temporal events, as Pocock explains, "could be defined not as sheer disorder" but as the product of social forces: specialization, the division of labor, and the growth of "luxury." The "ancient equation of change with degeneration," however, still "held fast." In the eyes of Machiavelli's successors— Harrington, Montesquieu, Rousseau—the specialization of civic functions, first dramatized by the emergence of mercenary armies, undermined civic virtue by making it possible for citizens to hand over their civic obligations, including the all-important obligation to bear arms, to professionals. According to republican theorists, standing armies not only posed a threat to liberty but contributed indirectly to corruption by enabling citizens to pursue their private advantage at public expense. Specialization generated new standards of comfort and refinement, encouraged the competitive accumulation of private wealth, and relieved citizens of the obligation to serve the commonwealth. It weakened sociability, in short, while the abundance made possible by an increasingly minute division of social labor inflamed men's imaginations with a taste for pleasure and led them to value evanescent pleasures more highly than durable achievements. Even proponents of commerce like Daniel Defoe spoke of the power of Credit, the personification of instability, in much the same language in which Machiavelli had spoken of fortune, as a jealous mistress whose "despotic" rule over men's fantasies

-51-