Economic Interests of the Middle Classes: Entrepreneurs

Abstract

The capitalist, industrialist or businessman, was the pivot of the bourgeoisie as defined and detested by Marxists and, indeed, the fulcrum of the whole notion of class, predicated as it was on the assumption that European society was changed rapidly and radically as a consequence of the growth of factory industry. The entrepreneur was the central focus of the language of class, the quintessential bourgeois, a new breed typifying the demise of traditional privilege, an individual who could make his way without landed wealth or aristocratic birth. Disliked by socialists and social reformers, he was admired for his initiative and daring in challenging much more than the old forms of industrial organisation.² He had no recognised place in society, operating in an atmosphere of laissez-faire, free from restraint by governments. These last two aspects led to a schizophrenic view of the capitalist; he sometimes grasped for a traditional social identity, provided his children with a classical education, married them into the landed nobility and bought a country estate. The free competitive atmosphere in which he operated was regarded by critics as a licence for the exploitation of the weak. Thus the entrepreneur was always an ambivalent figure — a valuable, but little valued element in nineteenth-century European society.

Time was when our baronial aristocracy was denounced by all. Now, praise be to God, it is dead and buried. But one must needs declare that the handful of new commercial aristocracies which have inherited their place are no less vain and no less tyrannical, but then they are founded on the pride born of money, and of all the family of pride there is none more despotic than this.¹