 That ambition yielded his major books of the nineties, "The Office of "The Scarlet Letter"" and "The Rites of Assent" (as well as his edited collections on "Reconstructing American Literary History" and "Ideology and Classic American Literature"), which in effect "complete the writing of the history of American liberal culture begun in the earlier work--a history that provocatively specifies how, in the United States, acts of withering dissent are put to the service of a vision of consensus.