testified to the unsettling "power of imagination." It was left to Rousseau, however, to provide the "first specifically modern theory" of man's self‐ enslavement to an ever-escalating cycle of wants and needs, in the words of Michael Ignatieff, and to link the "ancient stoic account of moral corruption" to the "economic conditions of modern capitalist society—inequality, acquisitive envy, and the division of labor."

Now we can see what was so novel about the eighteenth-century idea of progress, the distinctive features of which emerge even more clearly against the background of this republican critique of corruption and civic decline than against the background of Judeo-Christian prophecy. It was not the secularization of the Kingdom of God or even the new stress on processes intrinsic to historical development that chiefly distinguished progressive ideology from earlier views of history. Its original appeal and its continuing plausibility derived from the more specific assumption that insatiable appetites, formerly condemned as a source of social instability and personal unhappiness, could drive the economic machine—just as man's insatiable curiosity drove the scientific project—and thus ensure a never-ending expansion of productive forces. The moral rehabilitation of desire, even more than a change in the perception of time as such, generated a new sense of possibility, which announced itself most characteristically not in the vague utopianism of the French Enlightenment but in the hardheaded new science of political economy.

For eighteenth-century moralists like Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, and Adam Smith, it was the self-generating character of rising expectations, newly acquired needs and tastes, new standards of personal comfort—the very changes deplored by republican critics of commerce— that broke the old cycle of social growth and decay and gave rise to a form of society capable of indefinite expansion. The decisive break with older ways of thinking came when human needs began to be seen not as natural but as historical, hence insatiable. As the supply of material comforts increased, standards of comfort increased as well, and the category of necessities came to include many goods formerly regarded as luxuries. A

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