White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

The most important single fact about the society of small entrepreneurs was that a substantial proportion of the people owned the property with which they worked. Here the middle class was so broad a stratum and of such economic weight that even by the standards of the statistician the society as a whole was a middle-class society: perhaps four-fifths of the free people who worked owned property. In 1830 Tocqueville wrote, ‘Great wealth tends to disappear, the number of small fortunes to increase. ' Though he may well have exaggerated even for his own time, the mood he reflects was that of the people about whom he wrote.

This world did in reality contain propertyless people, but there was so much movement in and out of the petty-bourgeois level of farmers that it appeared that they need not remain property-less for long. Among the generation of elite businessmen who came to maturity during the first fifty years of the nineteenth century almost half were of lower-class origin; before that, under mercantilism, and afterward, under monopoly capitalism, the proportion was scarcely one-fifth. ‘One could always begin again in America,' John Krout and Dixon Ryan Fox pointed out; ‘bankruptcy, which in the fixed society of Europe was the tragic end of a career, might be merely a step in personal education.'