only because it allegedly undermined civic loyalty but because it held up self-abnegation as an ethical ideal. As Machiavelli put it, Christianity gave men "strength to suffer rather than strength to do bold things." "True Christians," said Rousseau, anticipating Nietzsche, "are made to be slaves."

For republicans, virtue implied the fullest development of human capacities and powers. They condemned a life devoted to the pursuit of wealth and private comforts not because it was selfish but because it provided insufficient scope for the ambition to excel. The contrast between selfishness and altruism, so prominent in recent communitarianism, played little part in the civic tradition. Even a "selfless" devotion to politics, warfare, or some other practice was seen to bring glory and renown—not, to be sure, as its reward, since excellence was its own reward, but as its necessary and appropriate accompaniment and validation. Republicanism condemned self-seeking when it tempted men to value the external rewards of excellence more highly than the thing itself or to bend the rules governing a given practice to their own immediate advantage. Self-seeking was objectionable because it led men to demand less of themselves than they were capable of achieving, and only incidentally because in measuring themselves against false standards they also injured others.

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preeminently the political philosophy of self-abnegation. Even Gordon Wood, whose meticulous craftsmanship is unrivaled among the republican revisionists, sometimes uses the term "virtue" as if it referred merely to the "sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good," in his words. Lance Banning argues, in a recent paper, that Wood underemphasized eighteenth-century recognition of the self-interested basis of conduct and thus misread as a "call for selflessness" what was really a call for "vigorous assertions of the self within a context of communal consciousness." Republicans associated virtue with virility, Banning points out, not with self-surrender. True, they valued a "self-denying spirit" that would "resist immersion in the private life of acquisition and enjoyment"; but "there was little in this talk that clearly called for self‐ effacing, totally disinterested regard for an abstracted general good, [and] little to suggest that citizens' decisions would or should be made without consideration of their interests." "Virtue" had far wider implications even than this, as literary historians have made clear. The division of labor that walls off literary history from political and intellectual history contributes to the confusion surrounding this issue.

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