trend toward economic equality, on which believers in progress had counted so heavily. Farmers, artisans, and craftsmen became wage slaves; more than any other development of the nineteenth century, including even the Civil War, the reconstitution of a degraded proletariat in the land of plenty—a permanent class of men and women without property—cast doubt on the agreeable assumption that limitless and irreversible innovation would annul the old cycle of growth and decline. Yet the republican idiom that might have enabled Americans to make sense of these reversals had begun to decay from disuse, and those who tried to revive it found themselves ridiculed as cranks and visionaries. Henry George's Progress and Poverty, a curious mixture of republicanism and "scientific" history, reached thousands of readers, both in the United States and in Europe, but remained suspect among the learned.

Even those who were moved by George's moral passion found him something of an eccentric, and this feeling, I believe, derived not only from his lack of academic training in economics and his commitment to the "new Jerusalem" of the single tax, as John Jay Chapman called it, but from his old-fashioned, seemingly naive and unsophisticated way of thinking about historical time. John L. Thomas, a sympathetic historian, deplores the "fascination with catastrophe" that intruded itself into Progress and Poverty. Henry George unfortunately shared the "fin de siècle obsession with cataclysm," according to Thomas; his speculations about what he called the law of human progress were "essentially ahistorical."

George's offense, it appears, lay in his insistence that the theory of continuous progress—the "hopeful fatalism" that "now dominates the world of thought"—was contradicted by the "rise and fall of nations," the "growth and decay of civilizations." George did not deny that "we of modern civilization" stood "far above those who ... preceded us." What he denied was that the achievements of modern civilization could be attributed to improvements now "permanently fixed in mental organization." History, he thought, did not support the "current view" that "improvement tends to go on unceasingly, to a higher and higher civilization." The modern world owed its wealth and power to the transmission of skills and knowledge from one generation to the next; but the delicate mechanism of cultural transmission had broken down many times in the past and could easily break down in the future. The process could not be likened to heredity; for "even if it be admitted that each wave

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