Laissez-Faire Capitalism and Realism in Literature. While Romanticism continued to hold sway in music until the rise of Modernism in the twentieth century, European writers, like their contemporaries in the visual arts, turned to Realism and Naturalism to depict the life of their times. Composers of music believed their medium to be a purer form of expression than painting or writing, and thus, almost by definition, no "realist" music could be written. During the 1830s and 1840s various European nations (notably England and France) established political regimes whose economic policies encouraged the development of free-market capitalism. A market economy had already been coming into existence for decades, but during the 1830s and 1840s its development was hastened by experiments with laissez-faire capitalism. In such an economic system the prices goods could command in an unregulated market were the sole guiding principle...