nation of the man to the citizen found its modern application in the dogma of the people as an absolute sovereign, which Brownson consistently opposed. He believed that the "inalienable rights of man" limited the powers of the state, whether it was controlled by "monarchs or mobs." This idea played no part in the civic tradition; those who wanted to find its antecendents, Brownson said, would have to look to the "feudal system, and still more to Christianity," which introduced the "element of individuality."

In his later phase, Brownson sometimes referred to himself as a republican, but only to remind his readers (just as Paine had reminded his) that the term's literal meaning referred to the public good, or else to argue that "the American people committed a serious mistake in translating republicanism into democracy" and should now "restore the government to the true principles of the Constitution." When Brownson invoked Harrington, it was only to disavow the impact of Harrington's work on his own views concerning the "influence of property on politics and legislation." We may dismiss his claim that these views were "original with me"; but wherever he got them, his general point of view clearly owed more to Christian influences, overlaid at times with influences deriving from the Enlightenment, than to the tradition of civic humanism.

His Christian radicalism nevertheless had certain points of contact with the republican tradition: a taste for verbal combat; a confidence in the educative, character-forming discipline of political life and the clash of opinions; a belief that "man has an end," namely to develop his capacities to the utmost; a suspicion that life was not worth living unless it was lived with ardor, energy, and devotion. "Nothing is ... more nauseating than to be lukewarm," he held. "Give us, we say, open, energetic, uncompromising enemies, or firm, staunch friends, who will take their stand for the truth, ... to live with it or die with it; and not your half and half men." To live or die for truth was not the same thing, to be sure, as living for glory; but these ideals had more in common than either had, say, with Paine's ideal of "peace and safety," let alone a more fully developed liberalism of the kind articulated by Adam Smith. Brownson thought politics ought to address moral issues of transcendent importance, even at the risk of disturbing the peace; for this reason, he dissociated himself, more than once, from Paine's dictum that government was at best a necessary evil.

His opposition to an educational establishment likewise sprang from

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