ABSTRACT
The American business man has certain remarkable qualities in an exceptional degree. The great business man in the United States has an aristocratic status comparable to that of the landowner or the soldier or the priest in pre-capitalist Europe. The business men of America operated the myth as practical men concerned to see that it secured the ends they had in view. In this sense American democracy engenders an aristocracy of its own in which the return to labour instead of the return to idleness is the criterion of adequacy. The Marshall Plan has not altered this. At some stage, the over-all situation would issue in a crisis incompatible with the traditional philosophy of business enterprise in the United States. The American business man's optimism is in one sense justified; no other people have a prospect immediately before it that offers so considerable an opportunity to the individual.
