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The Bourgeois(Ie) As Concept and Reality Immanuel Wallerstein The Bourgeois(ie) as Concept and Reality Définir le bourgeois? Nous ne serions pas d’accord. Ernest Labrousse (1955) In the mythology of the modern world, the quintessential protagonist is the bourgeois.* Hero for some, villain for others, the inspiration or lure for most, he has been the shaper of the present and the destroyer of the past. In English, we tend to avoid the term ‘bourgeois’, preferring in general the locution ‘middle class’ (or classes). It is a small irony that despite the vaunted individualism of Anglo-Saxon thought, there is no convenient singular form for ‘middle class(es)’. We are told by the linguists that the term appeared for the first time in Latin form, burgensis, in 1007 and is recorded in French as burgeis as of 1100. It originally designated the inhabitant of a bourg, an urban area, but an inhabitant who was ‘free’.1 Free, however, from what? Free from the obligations that were the social cement and the economic nexus of a feudal system. The bourgeois was not a peasant or serf, but he was also not a noble. 91 Thus, from the start there was both an anomaly and an ambiguity. The anomaly was that there was no logical place for the bourgeois in the hierarchical structure and value-system of feudalism with its classical three orders, themselves only becoming crystallized at the very moment that the concept of ‘bourgeois’ was being born.2 And the ambiguity was that bourgeois was then (as it remains today) both a term of honour and a term of scorn, a compliment and a reproach. Louis XI, it is said, took pride in the honorific ‘bourgeois of Berne’.3 But Molière wrote his scathing satire on ‘le bourgeois gentilhomme’, and Flaubert said: ‘J’appelle bourgeois quiconque pense bassement.’ Because this medieval bourgeois was neither lord nor peasant, he came eventually to be thought of as a member of an intermediary class, that is, a middle class. And thereby commenced another ambiguity. Were all urban-dwellers bourgeois, or only some? Was the artisan a bourgeois, or only a petty bourgeois, or not a bourgeois at all? As the term came to be used, it was in practice identified with a certain level of income— that of being well off—which implied both the possibilities of consump- tion (style of life) and the possibilities of investment (capital). It is along these two axes—consumption and capital—that the usage developed. On the one hand, the style of life of a bourgeois could be contrasted with that of either the noble or the peasant/artisan. Vis-à-vis the peasant/artisan, a bourgeois style of life implied comfort, manners, cleanliness. But vis-à-vis the noble, it implied a certain absence of true luxury and a certain awkwardness of social behaviour (viz. the idea of the nouveau riche). Much later, when urban life became richer and more complex, the style of life of a bourgeois could also be set against that of an artist or an intellectual, representing order, social convention, sobriety and dullness in contrast to all that was seen as spontaneous, freer, gayer, more intelligent, eventually what we today call ‘counter- cultural’. Finally, capitalist development made possible the adoption of a pseudo-bourgeois style of life by a proletarian, without the latter simultaneously adopting the economic role as capitalist, and it is to this that we have given the label ‘embourgeoisement’. But if the bourgeois as Babbitt has been the centrepiece of modern cultural discourse, it is the bourgeois as capitalist that has been the centrepiece of modern politico–economic discourse. The bourgeois has meant the one who has capitalized means of production, hiring workers for wages who in turn have made things to be sold on a market. To the extent that the revenue from sales is greater than costs of production including wages, we speak of there being profit, presumably the objec- tive of the bourgeois capitalist. There have been those who have celebrated the virtues of this social role—the bourgeois as creative entrepreneur. And there have been those who have denounced the vices of this social role—the bourgeois as parasitical exploiter. But admirers * This article was originally given as the Byrn History Lecture, Vanderbilt University, 23 March 1987. 1 G. Matoré, Le vocabulaire et la société médiévale, Paris 1985, p. 292. 2 G. Duby, Les trois ordres ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme, Paris 1978. 3 M. Canard, ‘Essai de sémantique: Le mot “bourgeois”’, Revue de philosophie fran¸aise et de littérature, XXVII, p. 33. 92 and critics have generally combined to agree that the bourgeois, this bourgeois the capitalist, has been the central dynamic force of modern economic life, for all since the nineteenth century, for many since the sixteenth century, for a few even longer than that. Nineteenth-Century Definitions Just as the concept ‘bourgeois’ has meant an intermediate stratum between noble/landowner and peasant/artisan, so the bourgeois era, or bourgeois society, came to be defined in two directions, backwards in time as progress over feudalism, and forwards in time vis-à-vis the promise (or threat) of socialism. This definition was itself a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, which thought of itself and has been thought of ever since by most people as the century of bourgeois triumph, the quintessential historical moment for the bourgeois—as concept, and as reality. What represents bourgeois civilization more in our collective consciousness than Victorian Britain, workshop of the world, heartland of the white man’s burden, on which the sun never set—responsible, scientific, civilized? Bourgeois reality—both its cultural and its politico–economic reality— has thus been something we have all known intimately and which has been described in remarkably similar ways by the three great ideological currents of the nineteenth century—conservatism, liberalism, and Marx- ism. In their conceptions of the bourgeois, all three have tended to agree upon his occupational function (in earlier times usually a merchant, but later an employer of wage labour and owner of the means of production, primarily one whose workers were producers of goods), his economic motor (the profit motive, the desire to accumulate capital), and his cultural profile (non-reckless, rational, pursuing his own inter- ests). One would have thought that with such unanimity emerging in the nineteenth century around a central concept, we would all have proceeded to use it without hesitation and with little debate. Yet Labrousse tells us that we will not agree on a definition, and he therefore exhorts us to look closely at empirical reality, casting as wide a net as possible. Furthermore, although Labrousse made his exhortation in 1955, I do not have the impression that the world scholarly community took up his challenge. Why should this be? Let us look at five contexts in which, in the work of historians and other social scientists, the concept of bourgeois(ie) has been used in ways that result in discomfort—if not theirs, then that of many of their readers. Perhaps by analysing the discomforts, we will find clues for a better fit between concept and reality. 1. Historians frequently describe a phenomenon designated as the ‘aristocratization of the bourgeoisie’. Some have argued, for example, that this occurred in the United Provinces in the seventeenth century.4 The system in Ancien Régime France of a ‘noblesse de robe’ created by the venality of office was virtually an institutionalization of this concept. It 4 D. J. Roorda, ‘The Ruling Classes in Holland in the Seventeenth Century’, in J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossman, eds., Britain and the Netherlands, II, Gröningen 1964, p. 119; and idem, ‘Party and Faction’, Acta Historiae Nederlandica, II, 1967, pp. 196–97. 93 is, of course, what Thomas Mann described in Buddenbrooks—the typical path of transformation in the social patterns of a wealthy family dynasty, from great entrepreneur to economic consolidator to patron of the arts, and eventually these days to either decadent roué or hedonistic–idealistic dropout. What is it we are supposed to be noticing? That, for some reason and at a certain biographical moment, a bourgeois seems to renounce both his cultural style and his politico–economic role in favour of an ‘aristocratic’ role, which since the nineteenth century has not necessarily been that of titled nobility but simply that of old wealth. The traditional formal symbol of this phenomenon has been the acquisition of the landed estate, marking the shift from bourgeois-factory owner-urban resident to noble-landowner-rural resident. Why should a bourgeois do this? The answer is obvious. In terms of social status, in terms of the cultural discourse of the modern world, it has always been true—from the eleventh century to today—that it is somehow ‘better’ or more desirable to be an aristocrat than a bourgeois. Now, this is remarkable on the face of it, for two reasons. One, we are constantly told by everyone that the dynamic figure in our politico– economic process is and has been—since the nineteenth century, since the sixteenth century, since perhaps even longer—the bourgeois. Why would one want to give up being centre-stage in order to occupy an ever more archaic corner of the social scene? Secondly, while what we call feudalism or the feudal order celebrated nobility in its ideological presentations, capitalism gave birth to another ideology which cele- brated precisely the bourgeois. This new ideology has been dominant, at least in the centre of the capitalist world-economy, for at least 150– 200 years. Yet the Buddenbrooks phenomenon goes on apace. And in Britain, even today, a life peerage is taken to be an honour.
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