view, at once diminished individuals, by exempting them from religious and civic duties, and built up imposing tutelary powers in the state. Having undermined citizens' capacities for self-defense, self-education, and mutual aid, the state would have to assume these functions itself. In order to counter the effects of acquisitive individualism, the state would have to promote a quasi-official religion in the hope of assuring uniformity of opinion. The emergence of interdenominational philanthropies, together with a uniform system of public education based on the same ideology of bland benevolence, suggested to Brownson that the attempt to press religion into the service of the state drained it of substance and weakened religion's capacity to offer effective resistance to the wealthy and powerful. The attempt to base public order on religion required the suppression of just those elements in religion—the doctrines that divided one sect from another but at the same time commanded intense loyalty—that would have given a certain gravity and moral weight to public discussion.

It should be obvious that Brownson's indictment of specialization owed more to Christian than to republican influences, though his analysis of the way specialization tends to erode moral capacities in individuals complemented certain features of the republican tradition. The important point that emerges from a comparison of Brownson, Cobbett, and Paine is that republicanism was not the only source from which opposition to "improvement" could be derived. Christianity provided an

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"special privileges" bestowed by the state. But if this explanation overlooked the way in which monopoly grew out of the inherent logic of economic competition, it nevertheless captured something overlooked by Marxists: the state's growing dependence on a wealthy class of private creditors (and, in our own time, on a growing class of corporate contractors for military supplies). The founders of modern states, eager to establish their legitimacy and to counter the unsettling effects of these states' revolutionary origins, made no secret of their intention to secure the loyalty of the rich by implicating them in the fortunes of the state. Populists understood the probable consequences of this policy more clearly than those who saw the state merely as the "executive committee of the ruling class." The new ruling class, as populists saw it, was itself the creation of the state—the product of the state's need for a more and more elaborate system of public finance, which grew in turn largely out of the requirements of modern warfare. It is by no means clear that republicans and populists had the worst of the argument about circulation, private property, and political economy in general.

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