the fashionable classes. Republicanism, earlier associated with manly prowess and military glory, with the pursuit of excellence through civic participation, a respect for the past, and a tendency to equate social change with degeneration, survived far more vigorously in Cobbett than in Paine. Even Cobbett, however, can be called a civic humanist only in a very general sense. His social thought rested on an appeal to memory, but he invoked the memory of old England, not the memory of classical antiquity or the Renaissance. After Cobbett, the Anglo-American critique of progress drew more heavily on religious than on republican themes, and it came to be associated with a growing admiration for the Middle Ages quite inconsistent with the classical imagery favored by republicans. Social critics like Thomas Carlyle, Orestes Brownson, John Ruskin, and William Morris loved the Middle Ages but found little merit in the Renaissance. Only their assault on the "paper system," together with an occasional reference to Harrington and his followers (hardly ever to Machiavelli), links them to the civic tradition, and even that aspect of their thought is better understood not as a residual republicanism but as a blend of several traditions in which republicanism became a more and more insignificant ingredient. These ingredients came together in a new kind of social criticism that could not be adequately characterized in the old terms. Its distinguishing features—best exemplified, for our purposes, in the American variant—included a defense of small farmers, artisans, and other "producers"; opposition to public creditors, speculators, bankers, and middlemen; opposition to the whole culture of uplift and "improvement"; and an increasingly detailed and eloquent indictment of humanitarianism, philanthropy, moral reformation, and universal benevolence—the "comforting system," as Cobbett scornfully called it.

Orestes Brownson's search for a satisfactory synthesis of politics and religion took him down so many twists and turns, so many false starts and blind alleys, that it almost defies attempts to find a thread of consistency

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