In sociology and in political science, the noun bourgeoisie ( /bʊərʒwɑːˈziː/) and the adjective bourgeois are terms that describe an historical range of socio-economic classes. In the Western world, between the late 18th century and the present, the bourgeoisie are a social class “characterized by their ownership of capital, and their related culture”.[1] Therefore, a member of the bourgeoisie is a bourgeois and a capitalist; in Marxist philosophy, and in contemporary academic and sociological theory, the term bourgeoisie also denotes “the ruling class” of a capitalist society.
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The French word bourgeoisie (citizen class) became a term of English usage denoting a social class oriented to materialism and hedonism, and to upholding the interests of the capitalist class.[2] In the pre–Revolutionary French feudal order, the term bourgeois denoted a social class that comprised the wealthier members of the Third Estate, the commons of the French realm. The term bourgeois derived from the Old French burgeis (walled city), which derived from bourg (market town), from the Old Frankish burg (town).[3] Since the 19th century, bourgeoisie usually is synonymous with the ruling upper class of a capitalist society.[4] See the Middle English burgeis, the Middle Dutch burgher, and the German Bürger (burgess).
In medieval times, the bourgeois was typically a self-employed proprietor, small employer, entrepreneur, banker or merchant. In industrial capitalism, on the other hand, the bourgeoisie becomes the ruling class—which means it also owns the bulk of the means of production (land, factories, offices, capital, resources – though in some countries land ownership would still be a monopoly of a different class, landed oligarchy) and controls the means of coercion (national armed forces, police, prison systems, court systems). Ownership of the means of production enables it to employ and exploit the work of a large mass of wage workers (the working class), who have no other means of livelihood than to sell their labour to property owners; while control over the means of coercion allows intervention during challenges from below.[5] Marx distinguished between "functioning capitalists" actually managing enterprises, and others merely earning property rents or interest-income from financial assets or real estate (rentiers).[6]
Marxism sees the proletariat (wage labourers) and bourgeoisie as directly waging an ongoing class struggle, in that capitalists exploit workers and workers try to resist exploitation. This exploitation takes place as follows: the workers, who own no means of production of their own, must seek employment in order to make a living. They get hired by a capitalist and work for him, producing some sort of goods or services. These goods or services then become the property of the capitalist, who sells them and gets a certain amount of money in exchange. Part of this money is used to pay workers' wages, another part is used to pay production costs, and a third part is kept by the capitalist in the form of profit (or surplus value in Marxist terms). Thus the capitalist can earn money by selling the surplus (profit) from the work of his employees without actually doing any work, or in excess of his own work. Marxists argue that new wealth is created through work; therefore, if someone gains wealth that he did not work for, then someone else works and does not receive the full wealth created by his work. In other words, that "someone else" is exploited. In this way, the capitalist might turn a large profit by exploiting workers.
Marx himself primarily used the term "bourgeois", with or without sarcasm, as an objective description of a social class and of a lifestyle based on ownership of private capital, not as a pejorative. He commended the industriousness of the bourgeoisie, but criticised it for its moral hypocrisy. This attitude is shown most clearly in the Communist Manifesto. He also used it to describe the ideology of this class; for example, he called its conception of freedom "bourgeois freedom" and opposed it to what he considered more substantive forms of freedom. He also wrote of bourgeois independence, individuality, property, family, etc.; in each case he referred to conceptions of these ideals which are compatible with condoning the existence of a class society.
In the view of some 20th century Marxist currents, the nomenklatura or lower state bureaucrats in "communist states" were or are a state bourgeoisie presiding over a system of state capitalism. To some schools of anarchists, all prominent members, functionaries and leaders of any kind of state are part of this state bourgeoisie. According to these interpretations, the bourgeoisie is composed of any individuals who have exclusive control over the means of production, regardless of whether this control comes in the form of private ownership or state power.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, merchants, businessmen, lawyers, jurists, and physicians were the protagonists of political and economic change. Defining the uniform character of middle class in this period is difficult. The very term "middle class" was not used in all countries (not in England for example) and could indicate different subjects, referring variously to family origin, residence, or profession. In Geneva, a distinction existed between "citizens", who formed a closed hereditary caste and "bourgeois", the least enfranchised of the enfranchised classes.
In France, citizenship often depended on the period of residence in the city and not by social rank. Sometimes account was also taken of the wealth and property in the city itself. In other cases the word bourgeois indicates who lived in town and had substantial income.
In Venice, the citizens were a different order from the nobles and commoners, divided internally into three grades, based on origin, ownership and occupation.
During the 19th century and, more generally, with the development of Capitalist society, the word acquires a further sense, going to state, according to the teaching of Marxist doctrine, a particular social class, formed by the owners of the means of production.
In the late Middle Ages, as cities were emerging, artisans and tradesmen began to emerge as both a physical and economic force. They formed guilds, associations and received charters for companies to conduct business and promote their own interests. These were the early bourgeoisie. In the late Middle Ages (the 14th and 15th centuries), they were the highest guildsmen and artisans, as evidenced in their ability to pay the fines for breaking sumptuary laws, and by paying to be called citizens of the city in which they lived. In fact the King of France granted nobility to all of the bourgeoisie of Paris in the late 14th century. They eventually allied with the kings in centralising power and uprooting feudal barriers against trade.
In the 17th and 18th century, the bourgeois supported the English revolution,[7] American revolution and French revolution in overthrowing the laws and privileges of feudal order. These changes in property law cleared the way for the rapid expansion of commerce and the establishment of capitalist societies. With the expansion of commerce, trade, and the market economy, the bourgeoisie grew in size, influence, and power. In many countries, the aristocracy either transformed into essentially bourgeoisie rentiers, or found itself overthrown by a bourgeois revolution.
The bourgeoisie was never without critics. It was first accused of narrow-mindedness, materialism, hypocrisy, and lack of culture, among other things, by persons such as the playwright Truldière and the novelist Flaubert, who denounced its supposed banality and mercenary aspirations. The earliest recorded pejorative uses of the term "bourgeois" are associated with aristocratic contempt for the lifestyle of the bourgeoisie. Successful embourgeoisement typically meant being able to retire and live on invested income.
The Italian fascist régime (1922–45) regarded the bourgeoisie, because of their ascribed cultural excellence, as an obstacle to Modernism.[8] Nonetheless, despite social hostility from the State, the Italian bourgeoisie and the bourgeois spirit were exploited to manipulate the greater public. In 1938, the Prime Minister of Italy, Benito Mussolini, gave a speech in which he established a clear distinction between capitalism and the bourgeoisie, people whom he described as a moral category, and as a state of mind.[8] Mussolini culturally and philosophically isolated the bourgeoisie from Italian society by portraying them as social parasites upon the State; draining the human potential of the Italian people, the working classes whom they exploit as part of their materialistic and hedonist approach to life.[8] Although the slogan “The Fascist man disdains the «comfortable» life” epitomized the anti-bourgeois principle, in the final years of the Italian Fascist régime there occurred the merging of the political and financial interests of Prime Minister Benito Mussolini and of the Catholic social circles, the ruling class of Italy
Philosophically, the bourgeois man was irreligious; thus, to existentially distinguish between Catholic faith and temporal religion, in The Autarchy of Culture: Intellectuals and Fascism in the 1930s, the priest Giuseppe de Luca said that:
Christianity is essentially anti-bourgeois . . . A Christian, a true Christian, and thus a Catholic, is the opposite of a bourgeois.[9]
Culturally, the bourgeois man was represented as unmanly, effeminate, and infantile; in Bonifica antiborghese (1939), Roberto Paravese said:
Middle class, middle man, incapable of great virtue or great vice: and there would be nothing wrong with that, if only he would be willing to remain as such; but, when his childlike or feminine tendency to camouflage pushes him to dream of grandeur, honours, and thus riches, which he cannot achieve honestly with his own ‘second-rate’ powers, then the average man compensates with cunning, schemes, and mischief; he kicks out ethics, and becomes a bourgeois.
The bourgeois is the average man who does not accept to remain such, and who, lacking the strength sufficient for the conquest of essential values — those of the spirit — opts for material ones, for appearances.[10]
The economic security, financial freedom, and social mobility of the bourgeoisie, as a social class, threatened the philosophic integrity of Italian Fascism, the ideology supporting the régime of Prime Minister Mussolini. Any assumption of legitimate political power (government and rule) by the bourgeoisie represented a Fascist loss of totalitarian State power for social control through political unity. Sociologically, to become bourgeois remained a character flaw inherent to the masculine mystique; therefore, the bourgeois man was scornfully defined as “spiritually castrated”.[10]
Marxism describes human culture as being subject to a dominant ruling-class culture, in this sense all modern industrial cultures are currently bourgeois cultures. However, in a more precise manner, a set of shared cultural mores have been attributed internationally to the bourgeois, many having their apparent origins in the shop culture of early modern France. This was ridiculed at length in the Émile Zola novel series, Les Rougon-Macquart.[11] Most noted features of domestic bourgeois culture focus on the central cultural space of the sitting room, and English bourgeois culture is often attacked as a sitting-room culture. Bourgeois material culture has focused on mass-produced, high-quality luxury items, though the material content of this has varied over time. The painted porcelain, machine-printed wallpaper and cotton fabrics, and Sheffield steel of the early 19th century have given way to luxury consumer items and contemporary conspicuous consumption. These items are often displayed wealth, rather than used wealth as in 19th-century working-class homes. In the past, display of wealth involved cluttered small rooms.[12] However, in the contemporary era this display involves large expanses of open space in the domestic setting.
Philosophically, those opposed to the "bourgeois mentality" as a social and cultural phenomenon, often use arguments built on two key spatial constructs: the shop display, and the sitting room.[12] In English, the term "sitting-room culture" is a synonym for bourgeois mentality. This cultural view is associated with Victorianism, in particular the repression of emotional and sexual desires, and the construction of an intensely regulated social space where the key desirable personal trait is propriety.
Sociologists such as Paula LeMasters have identified progressive values such as respect for non-conformity, self-direction, autonomy, gender equality and openness to innovation as middle class values in child-raising.[13][14] Many values identified as belonging to the middle classes may be related to the needs of middle-class professions. Self-control, advanced expertise, as well as innovation are commonly important to succeeding in middle-class occupations.[13]
A famous early satire of certain aspects of the bourgeois personality is Le Bourgeois gentilhomme by Molière.[15] The bourgeois is a recurring subject matter for Buñuel especially evident in the films,Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie and the surrealist movie L'Âge d'Or.[16][17]
In the rhetoric of some Communist parties, "bourgeois" is sometimes used as a pejorative, and those who are perceived to collaborate with the bourgeoisie are called its lackeys. Socialists, especially Marxists, have multiple uses for the term: the original meaning, the social class of capitalists, and the pejorative.
In the United States—outside of Marxism and anarchism[18]—the word bourgeois often refers to the social stereotype of the middle and often aspiring classes. It was associated with consumerist lifestyles often emphasising conspicuous consumption and material status.[19]
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