tic criticism of the new order deplored the weakening of social ties, the decline of craftsmanship, and the replacement of the sense of reciprocal obligation by competitive individualism; but the overwhelming strength of the forces making for change appeared to guarantee the futility of resistance.

Socialists like Karl Marx, William Morris, and Lewis Henry Morgan accepted most of the Romantic indictment of capitalism—summed up in the concept of alienation—as well as the assumption that it was impossible to return to an earlier stage of social development or even to deflect capitalist development from its preordained course. They took the position, however, that capitalism would give way in turn to a further stage, in which the alienating effects of modern life would be overcome and the old sense of solidarity reestablished on a new basis. "Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education," Morgan wrote, "foreshadow the next higher plane of society.... It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes. " Only the conviction that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction, William Morris said, kept him from joining the ranks of those who merely railed against progress.

Side by side with the idea of society, there grew up an idea of culture that retained but extended its older associations with the cultivation of the soil and the training of human capacities. "Culture" now served to call attention to the organic links between the organized mental life of a society and its folkways, habits, and patterns of work and play.

Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, among other historians, have explained the central role played by the concept of culture in English criticism of industrial capitalism. "Culture" referred not just to art and

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concept of "society," which treats politics purely as a derivative of underlying social forces.

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