Barkley wrote: Jim,
This is clearly a distortion. Certainly there were aristocratic elements who fought off poor poachers in their hunting forests, applauded Malthus, and supported "corn protectionism" against the urban bourgeoisie. Big deal.
But very quickly the radical left went to trying to overcome the split between the countryside and the urban system (see the platform at the end of the _Communist Manifesto_, a throwaway to the utopian socialists). Such motives drove later progressive planner types like Lewis Mumford, etc.
Of course one could argue that the successful outcome of all these "Garden City" movements (see Ebenezer Howard) was the modern suburb......
Charles - I was sensing a contradiction between the anti-city attitudes of the conservatives ("conservationists" ?) that Jim describes and the working class progressivity of the suburbs as anti-cities that Jim also ascribed to some in earlier posts. I haven't thought it all the way through, and I could see Jim resolving it somehow. Perhaps with the working class coming to conceive of itself as "middle class", they emulated the bourgeosie and moved to the suburbs. But that might be U.S. centric from an earlier empirical post. Maybe in Europe, the bourgeoisie resolved it anti-city anti-working class sentiment by driving the working class out of the city. In the U.S., they moved out of the city themselves.