equally important source; but liberalism itself mingled with these other currents in the stream of popular radicalism. Henry George, who stood in the line of Paine, Cobbett, and Brownson, took much of his inspiration (as did Paine himself) from Adam Smith.

In their enthusiasm for a rediscovered republicanism, revisionist historians have played it off against a caricature of liberalism, one that treats liberalism unambiguously as the philosophy of "possessive individualism." Here again, the revisionists have taken over elements of the very synthesis—that of Louis Hartz and C. B. Macpherson—they set out to revise; and it is the belated discovery that even liberals, after all, had reservations about acquisitive individualism that leads so many recent scholars into the further mistake of reading liberalism out of the historical record and of replacing it with a single, all-encompassing, "paradigmatic" tradition of civic humanism. Excessive attention to the republican critique of liberalism has had the effect of obscuring the larger point, stated very clearly by Pocock himself, that "bourgeois ideology, which old-fashioned Marxism depicted as appearing with historic inevitability, ... had to wage a struggle for existence and may never have fully won it." ^* The same conclusion emerges from the work of scholars opposed to

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Pocock seems to advance two distinct theses, which often work at cross-purposes. The eminently defensible contention that bourgeois liberalism did not "reign undisturbed" does not require the additional contention that everyone in the eighteenth century had to use the language of republicanism, in the absence of clearly defined alternatives. The latter claim is insupportable; yet it is this sweeping though dubious claim that Pocock seems especially eager to assert, even at the expense of the more important point that capitalism had many critics and that serious reservations crept into the writings even of its defenders. The republican "paradigm," he would have us believe, was the dominant, indeed the exclusive frame of eighteenth-century reference. Thus "both factions" in the debate about commerce and public credit shared the "same underlying value system, in which the only material foundation for civic virtue and moral personality is taken to be independence and real property." A more important question, however, was whether government had to rest on "civic virtue" at all. On that point, opinion was sharply divided, as Gordon Wood shows in his study of the American revolution. In opposition to the older view that "public virtue is the only foundation of republics," as John Adams put it, a number of publicists began to argue, in language reminiscent of Mandeville, that a proper system of constitutional checks and balances would "make it advantageous even for bad men to act for the public

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