Most early nineteenth-century Europeans opposed limitless capitalist expansion

Evidence

The fully developed capitalist entrepreneurs formed a small minority… . The small shop-keeper or local master did not want an economy of limitless expansion, accumulation and technical revolution… . His ideal was the secular dream of all “little men,” which has found periodic expression in Leveller, Jeffersonian or Jacobin radicalism, a small-scale society of modest property-owners and comfortably-off wage-earners, without great distinctions of wealth or power… . It was an unrealizable ideal, never more so than in the most rapidly evolving societies. Let us remember, however, that those to whom it appealed in early nineteenth-century Europe made up the majority of the population, and outside such industries as cotton, of the employing class. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 233

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘little man’ small-proprietor radicalism connects to Jeffersonian agrarianism and later populist movements; worth holding against the reader’s knowledge of pre-state trade communities and their norm of modest property-owners. — connects to: Nineteenth-century nationalism and capitalism’s own success forced a more interventionist state than Smith imagined. — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 310; After World War I most Europeans regarded capitalism’s abolition as imminent — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 31