tive control over nature that seemed to be inherent in the productive machinery of modern societies. Abundance, they believed, would eventually give everyone access to leisure, cultivation, refinement—advantages formerly restricted to the wealthy. Luxury for all: such was the noble dream of progress. Populists, on the other hand, regarded a competence, as they would have called it—a piece of earth, a small shop, a useful calling—as a more reasonable as well as a more worthy ambition. "Competence" had rich moral overtones; it referred to the livelihood conferred by property but also to the skills required to maintain it. The ideal of universal proprietorship embodied a humbler set of expectations than the ideal of universal consumption, universal access to a proliferating supply of goods. At the same time, it embodied a more strenuous and morally demanding definition of the good life. The progressive conception of history implied a society of supremely cultivated consumers; the populist conception, a whole world of heroes.

By progressive standards, the ideal of a society composed of small producers was narrow, provincial, and reactionary. It bore the stigma of its petty-bourgeois origins—a refusal to face the future. Contempt for petty‐ bourgeois backwardness, respectability, and religiosity became the hallmark of the progressive mind. The enlightened caricature of lower-middle-class culture contained undeniable elements of truth; otherwise it would have been unrecognizable even as a caricature. As time went on and large-scale enterprise crowded out small producers, petty-bourgeois movements became increasingly defensive and allied themselves with some of the worst impulses in modern life—anti—intellectualism, xenophobia, racism. But the same tradition of plebeian radicalism gave rise to the only serious attempt to answer the great question of twentieth-century politics: what was to replace proprietorship as the material foundation of civic virtue?

It also gave rise to the most impressive attempts to organize a mode of political action that would overcome resentment and thus break the "endless cycle" of coercion and injustice, as Reinhold Niebuhr called it. If the lower middle class was often attracted to a politics of envy and resentment, for that very reason it grasped the importance of a "spiritual discipline" against it. The progressive tradition, on the other hand, never grappled either with the question of proprietorship and virtue or with the question formulated by Niebuhr in 1932: "If social cohesion is impossi

-531-