No one in Jefferson’s day suspected the contradiction between commerce and education
Laramie, Wyoming Historians of democracy know that the phenomenon was built upon two principal social structures: bourgeois commerce and popular education. The first developed during the Middle Ages and grew until eventually it replaced war as the means by which states and individuals acquired wealth; the feudal class gave way to the bourgeoisie. The second developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in North America, the United States in particular. The two institutions were widely regarded as socially, morally, economically and politically complementary; necessary to the growth of a solid middle class, of capitalism and of republican government.
