Yet despite...accommodations with commerce, Mser regarded the market as primarily a threat--to the artisanal citizens of the town, to the traditional wants of the peasantry, and to the political structure to society, since it created a growing class of people outside the traditional paternalistic relations of the countryside. Mser's conception of contemporary political and economic trends in Osnabrck was essentialy tragic and tinged with that idealization of the past that would later be called romantic. Mser's heroes were the artisan-citizen and the independent peasant, his villains the shopkeeper and the peddler.
