Looking back over the ten books studied in the previous chapters, we can now sketch in a pattern of change and development. At the beginning, Spence and Ogilvie stand apart, not only because of their agrarian emphasis, but also because their social criticism is rooted in the language of natural rights, a language that has no great importance in any of the later texts. The thinkers who come next, Godwin, Hall, and Coleridge, are in different ways the most seminal. Godwin takes eighteenth-century associationism to the most egalitarian and optimistic conclusions. He offers the prospect of a glorious social future, achieved by a transformation and perfection of human character. The new moral worlds of Owen and Thompson flow from here. Hall's text is a watershed. It is the first of them significantly to borrow from and debate with classical economy; all of those that follow continue this debate. Coleridge's originality lies, in John Stuart Mill's well-known words, in his contribution ‘towards the philosophy of human culture’. His cultural critique of commercial society has affinities with that of Cobbett; both stand at the beginning of a tradition that embraces Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, Tawney, Eliot, and Leavis. A developing critique of exploitation is to be found in the texts, especially those of Spence, Ogilvie, God win, Hall, Ravenstone, Thompson, and Hodgskin. It begins as an offshoot of ‘the Norman yoke’ myth; conquerors monopolize the land and force the dispossessed to labour on highly unfavourable terms.