Even if you’re not exactly sure what bourgeois means, you’ve almost certainly noticed that it refers to something bad or embarrassing. But before I explain its actual meaning, I want to turn the tables on it: I will maintain that bourgeois is good. For most of us, the bourgeois way of life is something to be sought, and hopefully to be attained.
Now, let’s get back to the proper meaning of the term.
Who Is Bourgeois?
The original meaning of bourgeois was “middle class;” it refered especially to people like shopkeepers. It was a reference to people who were neither peasants (tenant farmers) or nobles (a legally privileged class).
Beginning in the 18th century, a variety of political theorists used the word to lambaste the people who stood in their way. Through 19th and 20th centuries it was seized by socialists, who continued it as a tool to discount and insult large numbers of people.
Now, to support my characterization of intellectuals using the word as an insult, here’s a comment from a famous French writer named Gustave Flaubert:
Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.
What really irked intellectuals about the bourgeois was that they were stealing their thunder. Over the 19th and early 20th centuries, intellectuals – people who wanted to sell their ideas – were rushing into socialism, because it could give them the same position the nobility used to hold: that of a legally privileged class.
But this was also the moment when the industrial revolution was hitting, and people chose commercial goods above socialist theories. In other words, the “masses” the socialists expected to lead were turning away from them. Look at it this way:
Why would someone spend long hours with difficult authors promising a golden age, when all the components of that golden age were for sale, cheap, at the corner store?
And so people walked away from literary promises, and toward shopkeepers offering the goods of a golden era at reduced prices. Socialist intellectuals still haven’t gotten over it.
Projection
There’s a concept in psychology called projection; it refers to people seeing their own problems in others, rather than themselves… of projecting their problems onto others.
In this case, however, I’m expanding that meaning: Socialists have not just projected their own problems onto the bourgeois, they’ve projected the problems of humanity onto them.
Consider this passage from Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt):
It is not what [the bourgeois man] feels and aspires that moves him primarily; it is what the folks about him will think of him.
What Lewis is complaining about is simply the stupidity of social standing, aka, status. That, however, is something which afflicts more of less all of the human race. And if you take a close look at the hotbeds of socialism (universities, particularly in social sciences), you’ll see far more fighting over status that you will among shopkeepers.
In the same book, Lewis complains that the “standardized minds” of the bourgeois “are the enemy.” This is astonishingly contradictory, seeing that socialists have both demanded and enforced the standardization of millions of minds via compulsory schooling.
Just one more, this time from an Italian writer named Roberto Paravese:
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.
And so Paravese first condemns the bourgeois for not staying in their place. Then he blames them for caring too much about appearances, something that, again, afflicts nearly all of humanity.
With that, I’ll stop. I think my point is made that the castigation of the bourgeois has been deceitful.
The Freedom of The Bourgeois
As I noted at the beginning of this post, the bourgeois way of life is something to be sought. And the reason for this is simple: The shopkeeper is a self-directed being, making his or her own choices, living with their consequences, and generally functioning as a free agent upon Earth.
Free agents are able to grow, to raise their children with independent minds, and to make their own choices. In short, they choose their own paths.
The poor, in contrast, are held within a narrow mode of life. The modern poor live on money obtained from the state; they are necessarily and fundamentally dependent upon the choices of others.
The modern analogs to the aristocracy or nobility, those feeding heavily from the government trough, are likewise slaves to the system, regardless of the fact that they control a great deal of it. Their money and their standing are tied directly to the system. Without it, their positions would collapse.
And so, only the bourgeois and those like them enjoy much fundamental freedom. Only the bourgeois hold their own fate in their own hands to any appreciable degree.
More than that, the bourgeois are, more or less, the people who make, repair and deliver everything. We know, in a direct way the others can’t, that we matter.
We are producers, and without production, everyone dies.
We, the producers, as it happens, are quite good at organizing ourselves. And when we do that even half-well, we enjoy independent success. Guilt and deceit aren’t baked into our pies.
Finally, it needs to be said that long-term commerce – the commerce of shopkeepers – supports humane civilization. This passage from a legal historian named John Maxcy Zane makes the point nicely:
Trade… makes for honesty, fair dealing, mutual comprehension, sanity and soundness, toleration of others, peace among men, aggregations of capital, division of labor, the ease and comfort and grace of life, the leisure for study, and the amelioration of customs and manners that produces so large a part of civilization.
Bourgeois people act stupidly from time to time, of course. But again, that’s a human problem, not a “class” problem. And despite those errors, bourgeois remains a more rewarding form of life than the others.
Now, I hope, we can stop apologizing for it.
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For more, see A Worker’s World.
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Paul Rosenberg
freemansperspective.com