The middle state is therefore best, as being least liable to those seditions and insurrections which disturb the community; and for the same reason extensive governments are least liable to these inconveniences; for there those in a middle state are very numerous, whereas in small ones it is easy to pass to the two extremes, so as hardly to have any in a medium remaining, but the one half rich, the other poor: and from the same principle it is that democracies are more firmly established and of longer continuance than oligarchies; but even in those when there is a want of a proper number of men of middling fortune, the poor extend their power too far, abuses arise, and the government is soon at an end.
Those who made conquests in Greece, having all of them an eye to the respective forms of government in their own cities, established either democracies or oligarchies, not considering what was serviceable to the state, but what was similar to their own; for which reason a government has never been established where the supreme power has been placed amongst those of the middling rank, or very seldom; and, amongst a few, one man only of those who have yet been conquerors has been persuaded to give the preference to this order of [1296b] men: it is indeed an established custom with the inhabitants of most cities not to desire an equality, but either to aspire to govern, or when they are conquered, to submit.
Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm, among others, Wells asserts, "When
middling southerners voiced opposition to planter intransigence in supporting manufacturing enterprises, when they spoke in favor of education reform, when they argued that dueling was a barbaric relic that embarrassed the region, they were expressing a class ideology that was clearly in pursuit of class interests." In several excellent chapters that explore travel patterns, voluntary associations, and education reform, Wells reveals that many professional and commercial groups across the Old South did have interests in common and shared certain cultural assumptions.
Enterprise was the foundation of this experience for the businessmen (if you happened to be a merchant, manufacturer, or master artisan), honor and authority figured centrally if you were a learned professional, and, for the lowlier, but still
middling, clerks, hope in the future was a touchstone of middle-class identity.
Chapters Two and Three set the scene by outlining how the vast energies of these
middling white men unleashed a democratic new political culture and an entrepreneurial new economic culture between the 1790s and the 1820s.
Uncertainty stalked the
middling shopkeeper, manufacturer or trader; Hunt unearthed telling case studies to enliven broader generalizations of middle-class hopes and terrors.
Smail's book traces the emergence of a culturally distinct group he calls the "middle class" out of the ranks of a more generic "
middling sort." In the course of developing this argument, Small supplies a rather detailed taxonomy of the two groups.
Although he would rise to fame and fortune, young Adams' family background was undeniably of "the
middling sort." The fact of his rise, and that of a number of other "Founders," has been acknowledged by historians.
Wahrman's method is to scrutinize the public pronouncements of the period between 1780 and 1840 for phrases expressive of a "middle-class" conception of society, polity, and history: "middle ranks," "middle station," "
middling order," "middle class," and "middle classes." He then examines the attributes bestowed upon this "imagined" category of the population and the polemical and analytical purposes to which they were put.