change. In the reaction against eighteenth-century liberalism, "society" became a rallying cry for those who condemned revolution on the grounds that deep-seated habits and prejudices could not be altered overnight, at least not without causing irreparable harm. "Manners are of more importance than laws," wrote Burke in 1796. "Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend." These words summed up a new consensus, shared not only by enemies of the revolution but eventually even by nineteenth-century socialists, for whom the state was merely a "superstructure" resting on obscure routines governing the provision of material sustenance and the biological reproduction of the species. For conservatives and socialists alike, the discovery of society implied a devaluation of politics. Legislation, war, and diplomacy, it now appeared, made little impression on the underlying structure of social relations. Statesmen operated within the narrow constraints, ignoring them at their peril, imposed by the organization of production, the pattern of beliefs, and the existing state of technology.

Not only the French revolution but the enormous acceleration of commercial development, the beginnings of industrialism, and the articulation of an economic theory that justified these developments in the name of progress contributed to the discovery of the social. Society became visible as such only when it began to lose its familiar shape and to change at a rate hitherto inconceivable. A growing belief that fundamental change of this sort was irresistible—a belief, incidentally, that distinguished nineteenth-century criticism of the new order from republican criticism of commerce in the eighteenth century—helped to focus attention on the subterranean forces thought to underlie it, forces often likened to a geological upheaval, hence lawlike in their operation. ^* Roman-

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On the difference between republican and sociological criticism of modern life, see John T. Miller's study of the social thought of Coleridge, Ideology and Enlightenment. Republicans, Miller points out, thought that "social modernization could be halted if only society could muster the will to do so, while [nineteenth-century critics] were convinced of ... the ineluctability of the process." Miller nevertheless considers republicanism and nineteenth-century conservatism as "parts of a single tradition"—a mistake, I think, because it overlooks an even more important difference. Republicans still believed in the primacy of politics. In the strictest sense, they did not yet have a

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