White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

Unlike the European, the American middle classes enter modern history as a big stratum of small enterprisers. Here the bourgeoisie exists before and outside of the city. In rural Europe, Max Weber has written, ‘the producer is older than the market'; a mass of peasants occupy the land, held to it by ancient tradition, so firmly that even the force of law during later periods never turn them into rural entrepreneurs in the American sense. In America, the market is older than the rural producer.

The difference between a peasant mass and a scattering of farmers is one of the historic differences between the social structures of Europe and America, and is of signal consequence for the character of the middle classes on both continents. There they begin as a narrow stratum in the urban centers; here, as a broad stratum of free farmers. Throughout the whole of United States history, the farmer is the numerical ballast of the independent middle class.