White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

WHAT happened to the world of the small entrepreneur is best seen by looking at what happened to its heroes: the independent farmers and the small businessmen. These men, the leading actors of the middle-class economy of the nineteenth century, are no longer at the center of the American scene; they are merely two layers between other more powerful or more populous strata. Above them are the men of large property, who through money and organization wield much power over other men; alongside and below them are the rank and file of propertyless employees and workers, who work for wages and salaries. Many former entrepreneurs and their children have joined these lower ranks, but only a few have become big entrepreneurs. Those who have persisted as small entrepreneurs are not much like their nineteenth-century prototypes, and must now operate in a world no longer organized in their image.

The free entrepreneurs of the old middle classes have diminished as a proportion of the gainfully occupied. They no longer enjoy the social position they once held. They no longer are models of aspiration for the population at large. They no longer fulfil their classic role as integrators of the social structure in which they live and work. These are the indices of their decline. The causes of that decline involve the whole push and shove of modern industrial society. Its consequences ramify deep into the world of twentieth-century America.