capitalism itself and thus to forestall demands for more radical change. Small insisted that if nineteenth-century liberals had "cultivated the whole philosophy of their teacher, instead of an abstracted section of it"—economic theory lifted from its "necessary moorings" in The Theory of Moral Sentiments—"much of the occupation of socialistic sectarians would have been gone." Something of the same reasoning could be applied to the idea of progress, so much more vulnerable to criticism, it appeared, in its nineteenth-century Spencerian form than in the form given it by Smith. When Henry George attacked the "prevailing belief" that "natural selection ... operates to improve and elevate the powers of man," it was Spencer's theory, after all, that he had chiefly in mind—the notion that "the struggle for existence ... impels men to new efforts and inventions" and that this "capacity for improvement is fixed by hereditary transmission." But progressive theorists like Small and Simon Patten no longer had to depend on Spencer; they scrapped Spencer's social Darwinism and revived the theory of progress, in effect, in its original version.

Patten's widely acclaimed treatise, The New Basis of Civilization, argued quite explicitly that the emergence of a "pleasure or surplus economy" effectively nullified the "ancient tragic model" of civilization and decay. "The story of the rise and fall of nations, repeated again and again, seems to justify the familiar conclusion that the decline of a society after an epoch of prosperity is a natural, incontrovertible law." But "those who would predict to-morrow's economic states from a study of the economic states of Rome or Venice" overlooked the unprecedented abundance made possible by the modern productive system, which placed civilization on a "new basis." Their apprehensions belonged to a "vanishing age of deficit." Thus Henry George and his followers maintained that "good lands and advantageous sites are scarce, and that multitudes are degraded by the pressure forcing them downward to poor locations." On the contrary, man's "dominion over nature" put an end to the "reign of want," according to Patten. "The social surplus is the superlative machine brought forth in the machine age for the quickening of progress." ^*

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*	By the time of the First World War, according to Guy Alchon, it had become a commonplace, especially among those who favored "managed capitalism" as an alter-

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