teenth century's confidence in scientific laws of history now looks quaint and unsophisticated, its apprehensions about the future seem reasonable enough. If we peel away the pseudo-scientific pretensions with the help of which writers like Henry George and Brooks Adams hoped to get a hearing, we find a solid core of historical realism, and the question no longer presents itself as one of puzzling out subjective reasons for an otherwise unaccountable "obsession" with impending doom. The question is not why the new industrial and imperial order inspired premonitory visions of its decline and fall but why those misgivings were so quickly submerged in a renewed celebration of progress.

The reassertion of the old republican myth of historical cycles might have led to a reassertion of republican principles in politics, education, and social thought—a rededication to the ideal of citizenship that had played such an important part in the nation's founding. Instead, the idea of democracy came to be associated more and more closely with the prospect of universal abundance. America came to be seen as a nation not of citizens but of consumers. The association of progress with consumption, however much it compromised a participatory conception of democracy, enabled Americans to rehabilitate progressive ideology and to place it on a new and seemingly solid foundation.

Adam Smith had already pointed the way; and the impulse to return to Smith—his rediscovery by progressive economists and sociologists otherwise critical of laissez-faire economics—sheds a good deal of light on the intentions underlying the progressive movement of the early twentieth century. For the influential sociologist Albion Small, Smith was the founder of modern sociology, a farsighted moralist and social theorist who refused to separate "technical economics" from "social philosophy." If Smith had lived until the end of the nineteenth century, Small thought, his political opinions would have resembled those of a modern social democrat more closely than those of Herbert Spencer. Smith would have welcomed the effect of democracy "in setting free the physical and mental and moral energies of wage-earners," since it increased the demand for goods and led to a general improvement in the standard of living. Smith's followers, especially Spencer, had given liberalism a bad name, and its rehabilitation, accordingly, demanded a return to its eighteenth-century origins.

Small's unexpectedly admiring appraisal of Smith expressed the essence of the progressive strategy: to recapture the democratic potential of

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