dividualists. Paine's cosmopolitan humanitarianism and Thoreau's misanthropy both sprang from the fallacy that man could outgrow the need for government—that is, for active intercourse with those to whom he was bound by "local attachments," a "preference for his own natal soil," and the "peculiar circumstances" in which he was raised. Ideologies of self-sufficiency and ideologies of self-annihilation (in which the man was lost in the citizen, in Paine's case in the citizen of the world) came to the same thing. Both undermined the "condensed" form of solidarity—the "love of family and fatherland"—that human nature required if it was to flourish. Both made excessive demands on human nature, overlooking the crucial fact that "the finite seeks in vain to master the infinite."

The idea conveyed by this last phrase ties together the several themes in Brownson's social thought: the inseparability of matter and spirit, politics and religion; the formative discipline of "peculiar circumstances" as the necessary background of mature personality; the need for any vivid apprehension of reality to be embodied in a particular (and inevitably divisive) set of loyalties rather than a watery eclecticism. Brownson never forgot that human beings have bodies and that "man disembodied," divested of the weight of circumstances and associations, "would be no more man, than the body is man when deprived of the spirit." ^* Man grasps the universal only through the particular: this was the core of Brownson's Christian radicalism.

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For this reason, Brownson opposed any theory of progress that implied a rejection of the past. Having sided in his early writings with "efforts for progress," he proceeded to take his readers "aback by telling them they must not run away from the past." The future could no more be dissociated from the past than the spirit could be dissociated from the body. "There is no foundation for the distinction between the movement party and the stationary party," he argued, "when one looks a little below the surface." Thus the point of his important essay "Reform and Conservatism" (1842) was to dissolve the distinction invoked by the title. "It is idle to war against the past. No man can be a reformer who has no tradition. Divest us of all tradition, of all that we have derived from the past ... and we were mere naked savages." Brownson's unwillingness to choose between reform and conservatism or to equate political radicalism with a repudiation of the past was typical of the populist tradition.

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