Resistance to the ideology of progress and its "hopeful fatalism" did not always take a conservative direction, contrary to earlier studies of the subject. A radical critique of "improvement," as we have seen, could be derived from an analysis of proprietorship and the civic virtues associated with it—enterprise, initiative, responsibility. Nineteenth-century populism took far more from the republican tradition and even from early liberal theorists like John Locke than from the conservatism of Edmund Burke. Populists condemned innovation because it undermined proprietary independence and gave rise to "wage slavery," not because it tore apart the delicate fabric of custom. They had little use for custom as such, nor did they cultivate a reverence for the past. But neither were they seduced by the rosy visions

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