A bit of perspective might be helpful here. The first attempt to displace the old feudal order with an embryonic capitalist system was in central Europe where the various merchant leagues clashed with nobles over their hereditary authority. This often allied those leagues with the monarchy. Indeed, for several centuries, the ambition was to establish a constitutional monarchy rather than to simply abolish all inherited privileges.
The most immediate result was more than a century of religious wars capped by the Thirty Years' War and a level of devastation that crippled bourgeois aspirations in Germany for generations. Plenty of people at the time said things like, "You know, this whole individualist thing means you butcher each other over infant baptism and cannibalize your own dead. Certainly, this disproves the value of capitalism and personal liberty." I'm sure it was very gratifying to those eager to draw such sweeping conclusions because having to think too hard about such things might make the brain ache. But the long sweep of history makes such feeble sweeping generalizations irrelevant. We shall see. Solidarity! Mark L.
