Without denying the differences that divided them, we can consider Brownson, Cobbett, and even Paine as representatives of a tradition of sorts, defined by its skepticism about the benefits of commercial progress and more specifically by the fear that specialization would undermine the social foundations of moral independence. Brownson achieved a more comprehensive grasp of the implications of "improvement," but he shared Cobbett's hatred of the "paper system" by means of which statesmen like Horace Walpole and Alexander Hamilton sought to attach the propertied classes to new states by appealing not to their "virtue" but to their self-interest as public creditors. Like Cobbett, he detested the "comforting system" as well. * The bureaucratization of benevolence, in his
____________________| * | The new order, he saw, would have to include not only a financial and a military establishment—and it was the expense of standing armies that necessitated the reform of public finance in the first place—but an educational and philanthropic establishment as well. The "comforting system," as Cobbett called it, represented in many ways the most dangerous form of specialization of all, as a result of which the ordinary citizen, already relieved of his military obligations, would hand over to the state even the residual obligations of neighborliness and Christian charity. Would it be going too far to say that these ideas provide us with the elements of a highly sophisticated theory of the modern state? I cannot claim that Brownson developed them in that direction; after 1840, his "disgust with democracy" prevented him from elaborating his political ideas in a systematic way, and he was never a systematic thinker to begin with. Still, the insights he shared with other populists should not be lost sight of. The usual criticism of populism, which has been revived in recent controversies about republicanism, accuses populists of an excessive interest in problems of finance, credit, and money—in other words, of an undue emphasis on the circulation of commodities as opposed to their production. There is some justice in this charge, though it has to be modified in view of the populist critique of wage labor, which paralleled the Marxist critique even if it did not lead to a condemnation of private property. The failure to recognize private property as the root of the difficulty, according to Marxists and social democrats, doomed populism to analytical and practical futility. Objecting to monopoly, the concentration of economic power in the hands of a smaller and smaller class of capitalists, populists erroneously attributed it to the |
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