strike it rich, that proponents of a more orderly economic development attached so much importance to the family. The obligation to support a wife and children, in their view, would discipline possessive individualism and transform the potential gambler, speculator, dandy, or confidence man into a conscientious provider. Moral and mental development stimulated material development and tempered it at the same time. An enterprising, intelligent, and self-disciplined population would demand an ever-growing supply of goods and services to satisfy its ever-increasing wants. By tying consumption to the family, the guardians of public order hoped not only to stimulate but to civilize it. Their confidence that new standards of comfort would not only promote economic expansion but level class distinctions, bring nations together, and even abolish war is impossible to understand unless we remember that it rested on the domestication of ambition and desire.

A liberal society that reduced the functions of the state to the protection of private property had little room for the concept of civic virtue. Having abandoned the old republican ideal of citizenship along with the republican indictment of "luxury," liberals lacked any grounds on which to appeal to individuals to subordinate private interest to the public good. But at least they could appeal to the higher selfishness of marriage and parenthood. They could ask, if not for the suspension of self-interest, for its elevation and refinement. Rising expectations would lead men and women to invest their ambitions in their offspring. The one appeal that could not be greeted with cynicism or indifference was the appeal later summarized in the twentieth-century slogan, "our children: the future" (a slogan that made its appearance only when its effectiveness could no longer be taken for granted). Without this appeal to the immediate future, the belief in progress could never have served as a unifying social myth, one that kept alive a lingering sense of social obligation and gave self‐ improvement, carefully distinguished from self-indulgence, the force of a moral imperative.

In one of the notes made early in the course of his American travels, Alexis de Tocqueville spoke of a "sort of refined and intelligent egoism" as the "pivot on which the whole machine turns"; and he went on to ask himself just "how far ... the two principles of the good of the individual and the good of the whole really coincide." In Democracy in America, Tocqueville repeatedly emphasized the importance of religion and family

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