Deirdre McCloskey is of the view that the “the clerisy” has been, with notable exceptions, hostile to capitalism and downright contemptuous of the morals and attitudes of the middle class that has flourished under capitalism:
The Germans called it the Clerisei or later the Bildungsbürgertum, the cultivated and reading as against the commercial and bettering bourgeoisie. In the eighteenth century the members of the clerisy such as Voltaire and Tom Paine had courageously advocated our liberties.
But in the 1830s and 1840s a much enlarged clerisy, mostly the sons of bourgeois fathers, commenced sneering at the liberties the fathers exercised so vigorously in the market and the factory.
On the right the clerisy under the influence of Romance looked back with nostalgia to an imagined medieval time without markets, in which stasis and hierarchy ruled…
On the left, meanwhile, the clerisy, likewise influenced by Romance, and then by historical materialism, developed the illiberal idea that ideas do not matter.
What matters to progress, they declared, is the unstoppable tide of history, aided (they declared further, contradicting themselves) by protests or strikes or even violent revolutions directed at the thieving bourgeoisie, movements to be led of course by the clerisy.
Later, in European socialism and American progressivism, the left proposed to defeat bourgeois monopoly of markets by gathering under regulation or central planning or ownership of the means of production all the monopolies into one big monopoly of violence called the state.
Yet the commercial bourgeoisie so despised by the clerisy left and right made the Great Enrichment and the modern world.
The Enrichment gigantically improved our lives, showing that both social Darwinism and economic Marxism were mistaken. The genetically inferior races and classes and ethnicities proved not to be so. The exploited proletariat was not immiserised but enriched.
and
Forcing in an illiberal way the French style of equality of outcome, cutting down the tall poppies, treating people as sad children to be engineered by the experts of the clerisy, we have found, has often had a high cost in damaging liberty and slowing betterment. Not always, but often.
On the other hand, introducing the Scottish style of equality of liberty and dignity, as in Hong Kong and Norway and France itself, has regularly led to an astounding betterment and to a real equality of outcome—with even the poor acquiring automobiles and plumbing denied in earlier times even to the rich, and acquiring political rights and social dignity denied in earlier times to everyone except the rich
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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