Before Goodwyn, historians sympathetic to Populism stressed the connections between Populism, progressivism, and social democracy, as if the Populists could be redeemed from the charge of benighted rural reaction only by assimilating them to later movements more acceptable to liberal intellectuals. John Hicks and Chester MacArthur Destler saw the Populists as proto-progressives, while Norman Pollack tried to pass them off as socialists in all but name. Goodwyn sees their program of self‐ education, on the other hand, as more democratic and hence more radical than anything coming out of subsequent movements. It is no part of his defense of the Populists to conscript them into the advancing march of progress. "They saw the coming society and they did not like it." For those who still believe that "modernization" is destined to carry the day, such a judgment will consign the Populists to the garbage dump of history. As Goodwyn notes, "the idea that workable small-unit democracy is possible within large-unit systems of economic production is alien to the shared presumptions of 'progress' that unite capitalists and communists in a religious brotherhood." The obsolescence of small-scale production, a closely related dogma, needs reexamination in its own right, and Goodwyn calls for a new look at the "entire subject of large-scale agriculture in the modern state, both under capitalist and communist systems of organization."

The originality of Goodwyn's interpretation lies in his rejection of the usual assumption that progress brings democracy. He thinks, on the contrary, that a belief in the inexorable laws of development usually goes along with a certain contempt for ordinary people and their antiquated customs and ideas. In the I890s, the "people" and "progressive society," he argues, represented contrasting and competing, not complementary, symbols. The "contest between 'the people' and 'the progressive society' " ended in the defeat of the former and the rise of the "progressive movement," a more cautious and limited movement than Populism, founded on the ruins of participatory democracy.

The denunciation of Goodwyn's work by Marxist historians confirms his contention that socialists share with liberals a dogmatic commitment to progressive views of history, which makes it impossible for them to see any value in the radical movements once mounted by small proprietors. David Montgomery chides Goodwyn for neglecting a "class analysis of rural America" and for ignoring the distinction between landowners,

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