White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

As an economic fact, the old independent entrepreneur lives on a small island in a big new world; yet, as an ideological figment and a political force he has persisted as if he inhabited an entire continent. He has become the man through whom the ideology of Utopian capitalism is still attractively presented to many of our contemporaries. Over the last hundred years, the United States has been transformed from a nation of small capitalists into a nation of hired employees; but the ideology suitable for the nation of small capitalists persists, as if that small-propertied world were still a going concern. It has become the grab-bag of defenders and apologists, and so little is it challenged that in the minds of many it seems the very latest model of reality.

Nostalgia for the rural world of the small entrepreneur now so effectively hides the mechanics of industry that the farmer, the custodian of national life, is able to pursue his cash interests to the point of defying the head of the government in time of war. And while the small urban entrepreneur, as an examplar of the competitive way, suffers exhaustion, the officials of American opinion find more and more reason to proclaim his virtues. ‘We realize. ' Senator James Murray has said, ‘that small business constitutes the very essence of free enterprise and that its preservation is fundamental to the American idea. ' The logic of the small entrepreneurs is not the logic of our time; yet if the old middle classes have been transformed into often scared and always baffled defenders, they have not died easily; they persist energetically, even if their energies sometimes seem to be those of cornered men.