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Bourgeois Personality Information

In sociology and in political science, the noun bourgeoisie (Fr.: [ˈbuʁʒwazi] | Eng.: / b ʊər ʒ w ɑː ˈ z iː /) and the adjective bourgeois are terms that describe an historical range of socio-economic classes. As such, in the Western world, since the late 18th century, the bourgeoisie describes a social class “characterized by their ownership of capital, and their related culture”; hence, the personal terms bourgeois (masculine) and bourgeoisie (feminine) culturally identify the man or woman who is a member of the wealthiest social class of a given society.[1] In Marxist philosophy, and in contemporary academic and sociologic theories, the term bourgeoisie denotes the social class whose societal concerns are the value and preservation of property, and the perdurance of their economic supremacy in their society.[2]

Contents

Etymology

The Modern French word bourgeois derived from the Old French burgeis (walled city), which derived from bourg (market town), from the Old Frankish burg (town); in other European languages, the etymologic derivations are the Middle English burgeis, the Middle Dutch burgher, the German Bürger (burgess), and the Polish burżuazja, which occasionally is synonymous with “the intelligentsia”.[3] In English, “bourgeoisie” (a French citizen-class) identified a social class oriented to economic materialism and hedonism, and to upholding the extreme political and economic interests of the capitalist class ruling class.[4] In the 18th century, before the French Revolution (1789–99), in the French feudal order, the masculine and feminine terms bourgeois and bourgeoisie identified the rich men and women who were members of the urban and rural Third Estate — the common people of the French realm, who violently deposed the absolute monarchy of the Bourbon King Louis XVI (r. 1774–91), his clergy, and his aristocrats. Hence, since the 19th century, the term “bourgeoisie” usually is politically and sociologically synonymous with the ruling upper class of a capitalist society.[5]

The 17th-century French playwright Molière (1622–73) catalogued the essence of the bourgeoisie. (Portrait by Nicolas Mignard, 1658)

Historically, the mediæval French word bourgeois denoted the inhabitants of the bourgs (walled market-towns), the artisans and the craftsmen who constituted the bourgeoisie, they were the socio-economic class between the peasants and the landlords, between the workers and the owners of the means of production. Resultantly, as the economic managers of the (raw) materials, the goods, and the services, and thus the capital (money) produced by the feudal economy, the term “bourgeoisie” evolved to also denote “the middle class” — the businessmen and businesswomen who accumulated, administered, and controlled the capital that made possible the development of the bourgs into cities.[6]

Contemporarily, the term “bourgeois” identifies middle-class people, the men and women whose worldview (Weltanshauung) is socially and culturally determined by their economic materialism and philistinism, a social identity catalogued and described in drame bourgeois (bourgeois drama).[7] In the comedy–ballet play Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-be Gentleman, 1670), the dramaturge Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) satirized the nouveau riche businessman who buys his way up the social-class scale, in order to realise his aspirations of becoming a gentleman, someone who, in 17th-century France, was a man born to the social-class role, not a self-made social climber. The prototype bourgeois is Monsieur Jourdain, the protagonist who studies dancing, fencing, and philosophy, the accomplishments of a gentleman, in order to pose as a man of noble birth.[8]

History

The German banker Jacob Fugger and his principal accountant, M. Schwarz, registering an entry to a ledger. The background shows a file cabinet indicating the European cities where the Fugger Banker conducts business. (1517)
Origins and rise

In the 11th century, the bourgeoisie emerged as an historical and political phenomenon, when the bourgs of Central and Western Europe developed into cities dedicated to commerce. The organised economic concentration that made possible such urban expansion derived from the protective self-organisation into guilds, which became necessary when individual businessmen (craftsmen, artisans, merchants, et alii) conflicted with their rent-seeking feudal landlords who demanded greater-than-agreed rents. In the event, by the end of the Middle Ages (ca. AD 1500), under régimes of the early national monarchies of Western Europe, the bourgeoisie acted in self-interest, and politically supported the king or the queen against the legal and financial disorder caused by the greed of the feudal lords. In the late-16th and early 17-th centuries, the bourgeoisies of England and the Netherlands had become the financial — and thus political — forces that deposed the feudal order; economic power had vanquished military power in the realm of politics.[9]

From progress to reaction

During the 17th and 18th centuries, the bourgeoisie were the politically progressive social class who supported the principles of constitutional government and of natural right, against the law of privilege and the claims of rule by divine right that the nobles and prelates had autonomously exercised during the feudal order. The motivations for the English Civil War (1642–51), the American War of Independence (1775–83), and French Revolution (1789–99) partly derived from the desire of the bourgeoisie to rid themselves of the feudal trammels and royal encroachments upon their personal liberty, commercial rights, and the ownership of property. In the 19th century, the bourgeoisie propounded liberalism, and gained political rights, religious rights, and civil liberties for themselves and the lower social classes; thus was the bourgeoisie then a progressive philosophic and political force in modern Western societies.

By the middle of the 19th century, subsequent to the Industrial Revolution (1750–1850), the great expansion of the bourgeoisie social class caused its self-stratification — by business activity and by economic function — into the haute bourgeoisie (bankers and industrialists) and the petite bourgeoisie (tradesmen and white-collar workers). Moreover, by the end of the 19th century, the capitalists (the original bourgeoisie) had ascended to the upper class (people whose money works for them), whilst the developments of technology and the technical occupations thereby engendered, allowed the ascension of working-class men and women to the lower strata of the bourgeoisie; yet the social progress was incidental. In the event, despite its initial philosophic progressivism — from feudalism to liberalism to capitalism — like all ruling political establishments, the bourgeoisie social class (haute and petite) became reactionary in their refusal to allow the ascendance (economic, social, political) of people from the proletariat (peasants and urban workers) in order to remain predominant, as the political Establishment of their society.[10]

Denotations

The 19th-century German intellectual K.H. Marx (1818–83) identified and described the bourgeoisie as an economic class of great societal influence.
The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie

In the Middle Ages (AD 500–1500), the bourgeois usually was a self-employed businessman — proprietor, merchant, banker, entrepreneur, et alii — whose economic role in society was being the financial intermediary to the feudal landlord and the peasant who worked the fief, the land of the lord. Yet, by the 18th century, the time of the Industrial revolution (1750–1850) and of industrial capitalism, the bourgeoisie had become the economic ruling class who owned the means of production (capital and land), and who controlled the means of coercion (armed forces and legal system, police forces and prison system). In such a society, the bourgeoisie’s ownership of the means of production enabled their employment and exploitation of the wage-earning working class (urban and rural), people whose sole economic means is labour; and the bourgeois control of the means of coercion suppressed the socio-political challenges of the lower classes, and so preserved the economic status quo; workers remained workers, and employers remained employers.[11]

In the 19th century, the German economist Karl Marx distinguished two types of bourgeois capitalist: (i) the functional capitalist, the business administrator of the means of production; and (ii) the rentier capitalist whose livelihood derives either from the rent of property or from the interest-income produced by finance capital, or both.[12] In the course of economic relations, the working class and the bourgeoisie continually engage in class struggle, wherein the capitalists exploit the workers, whilst the workers resist their economic exploitation, which occurs because the worker owns no means of production, and, to earn a living, he or she seeks employment from the bourgeois capitalist; the worker produces goods and services that are property of the employer, who sells them for a price. The money generated by the sale of the goods and services yields three sums (i) the wages of the worker, (ii) the costs of production, and (iii) profit (surplus value). Thereby, the capitalist profits (makes extra money) by selling the surplus value of the labour of the workers; hence is new wealth created through work.

Besides describing the social class who own the means of production, the Marxist usage of the term “bourgeois” also describes the consumerist style of life derived from the ownership of capital and real property. As an economist Karl Marx acknowledged the bourgeois industriousness that created wealth, yet criticised the moral hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie when they ignored the true origins of their wealth — the exploitation of the proletariat, the urban and rural workers. Further sense denotations of “bourgeois” describe ideologic concepts such as “bourgeois freedom”, which is opposed to substantive forms of freedom; “bourgeois independence”; “bourgeois personal individuality”; the “bourgeois family”; et cetera, all derived from owning capital and property. (See: The Communist Manifesto, 1848)

The state bourgeoisie

In the 20th century, communist states developed the nomenklatura, a state bourgeoisie constituted by the bureaucrats who administrated the country’s government, industry, agriculture, education, system of state capitalism, et cetera. Moreover, anarchism occasionally describes all important state leaders and functionaries as part of the state bourgeoisie who control the private and public means of production in a state.

Modern history

Fascist Italy

Because of their ascribed cultural excellence as a social class, the Italian fascist régime (1922–45) of Prime Minister Benito Mussolini regarded the bourgeoisie, as an obstacle to Modernism in aid to transforming Italian society.[13] Nonetheless, despite such intellectual and social hostility, the Fascist State ideologically exploited the Italian bourgeoisie and their materialistic, middle-class spirit, for the more efficient cultural manipulation of the upper (aristocratic) and the lower (working) classes of Italy. In 1938, Prime Minister Mussolini gave a speech wherein he established a clear ideological distinction between capitalism (the social function of the bourgeoisie) and the bourgeoisie (as a social class), whom he dehumanized by reducing them into high-level abstractions: a moral category and a state of mind.[13] Culturally and philosophically, Mussolini isolated the bourgeoisie from Italian society by portraying them as social parasites upon the Fascist Italian State and “The People”; as a social class who drained the human potential of Italian society, in general, and of the working class, in particular; as exploiters who victimized the Italian nation with an approach to life characterised by hedonism and materialism.[13] Nevertheless, despite the slogan The Fascist Man Disdains the «Comfortable» Life, which epitomized the anti-bourgeois principle, in its final years of power, for mutual benefit and profit, the Mussolini Fascist régime transcended ideology in order to merge the political and financial interests of Prime Minister Benito Mussolini with the political and financial interests of the bourgeoisie, the Catholic social circles who constituted the ruling class of Italy.

Philosophically, as a materialist creature, the bourgeois man was irreligious; thus, to establish an existential distinction between the supernatural faith of the Catholic Church and the materialist faith of temporal religion; in The Autarchy of Culture: Intellectuals and Fascism in the 1930s, the priest Giuseppe Marino said that:

Christianity is essentially anti-bourgeois . . . A Christian, a true Christian, and thus a Catholic, is the opposite of a bourgeois.[14]

Culturally, the bourgeois man is unmanly, effeminate, and infantile; describing his philistinism in Bonifica antiborghese (1939), Roberto Paravese said that the:

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 child-like 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.[15]

The economic security, financial freedom, and social mobility of the bourgeoisie threatened the philosophic integrity of Italian Fascism, the ideologic monolith that was the régime of Prime Minister Benito 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 — one people, one nation, one leader. Sociologically, to the fascist man, to become a bourgeois was a character flaw inherent to the masculine mystique; therefore, the ideology of Italian Fascism scornfully defined the bourgeois man as “spiritually castrated”.[15]

Bourgeois culture

The German cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) identified the cluttered sitting-room as the bourgeois’s success as businessman and conspicuous consumer. The Spanish cinéast Luis Buñuel (1900–83) was fascinated by the bourgeois mentality and its self-destructive hypocrisy.
Cultural hegemony

In his economic analyses, Karl Marx said that the culture of a society is dominated by the mores of the ruling-class, wherein their superimposed value system is abided by each social class (the upper, the middle, the lower) regardless of the socio-economic results it yields to them. In that sense, contemporary societies are bourgeois to the degree that they practice the mores of the small-business “shop culture” of early modern France; which the writer Émile Zola (1840–1902) naturalistically presented, analysed, and ridiculed in the twenty-two-novel series (1871–1893) about Les Rougon-Macquart family; the thematic thrust is the necessity for social progress, by subordinating the economic sphere to the social sphere.[16]

Conspicuous consumption

The critical analyses of the bourgeois mentality by the German intellectual Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) established that the shop culture of the petite bourgeoisie is notable for establishing the sitting room as the centre of personal and family life; as such, the English bourgeois culture is a sitting-room culture of prestige through conspicuous consumption. (See: Culture and Anarchy, 1869) The material culture of the bourgeoisie concentrated upon mass-produced luxury goods of high quality; generationally, the only variance was the materials with which the goods were manufactured. In the early part of the 19th century, the bourgeois house contained a home that first was stocked and decorated with hand-painted porcelain, machine-printed cotton fabrics, machine-printed wallpaper, and Sheffield steel (crucible and stainless), the utility of which was inherent to its practical functions. Whereas, in the latter part of the 19th century, the house contained a home that had been remodelled by conspicuous consumption, whereby the goods were bought to display wealth (discretionary income), rather than for their practical utility. The bourgeoisie had transposed the wares of the shop window to the sitting room, where the clutter of display signalled bourgeois success; contemporarily, the shop-window display and consumerist clutter are practiced in the large sitting-rooms of over-sized houses.[17]

The bourgeois mentality

Two spatial constructs manifest the “bourgeois mentality”: (i) the shop-window display, and (ii) the sitting room. In English, the term “sitting-room culture” is synonymous for “bourgeois mentality”, a philistine cultural perspective from the Victorian Era (1837–1901), especially characterised by the repression of emotion and of sexual desire; and by the construction of an regulated social-space where “propriety” is the key personality trait desired in men and women.[17] Nonetheless, from such a psychologically constricted worldview, regarding the rearing of children, contemporary sociologists claim to have identified “progressive” middle-class values, such as respect for non-conformity, self-direction, autonomy, gender equality and the encouragement of innovation; as in the Victorian Era, in its U.S. transposition, the bourgeois system of social values has been identified as a requisite for employment success in the professions.[18][19]

The bourgeoisie in literature and cinema

The philistinism of the middle-class personality is presented, described, and analysed in the comedy-ballet play Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-be Gentleman, 1670) by Molière, which ridicules buying the trappings of a noble-birth identity as a means of scaling the social ladder; the constructs of the shop-window and the sitting-room as the public persona of the bourgeois.[20] Moreover, the cinema of director Luis Buñuel (1900–83) — L’Âge d’or (The Golden Age, 1930), Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972), and Cet obscur objet du désir (That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977) — especially explores the moral hypocrisy of the middle class, and the practical self-deception required of the bourgeois and the bourgeoisie in order to live such a life.[21][22]

The pejorative “bourgeois”

In the United States — beyond the socio-economic and political realms of Marxism and anarchism — the uses of the historical term bourgeois describe a social stereotype of the middle class and the nouveau riche as a politically timid conformist who is satisfied with a wealthy, consumerist style of life characterised by conspicuous consumption and continual striving for prestige.[23][24]

See also

References

  1. ^ Bourgeois Society
  2. ^ Dictionary.com, Dictionary.com. "bourgeoisie". Random House, Inc.. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bourgeoisie. Retrieved 19 April 2012.
  3. ^ The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology C.T. Onions, Editor (1995) p. 110.
  4. ^ Oxford English Reference Dictionary Second Edition (1996) p. 196.
  5. ^ Dictionary of Historical Terms Chris Cook, Editor (1983) p. 267.
  6. ^ “Bourgeoisie”, The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition. (1994) p. 0000.
  7. ^ Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia Third Edition (1987) p. 118, p. 759.
  8. ^ Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia Third Edition (1987) p. 118, p. 512.
  9. ^ “Bourgeoisie”, The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition. (1994) p. 0000.
  10. ^ “Bourgeoisie”, The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition. (1994) p. 0000.
  11. ^ The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, Works of Karl Marx, 1850
  12. ^ A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, T.B. Bottomore, p. 272
  13. ^ a b c Bellassai, Sandro (2005) “The Masculine Mystique: Anti-Modernism and Virility in Fascist Italy”, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 3, pp. 314–335.
  14. ^ Marino, Giuseppe Carlo (1983) L'autarchia della cultura. Intellettuali e fascismo negli anni trenta, Roma: Editori Riuniti.
  15. ^ a b Paravese, Roberto (1939) "Bonifica antiborghese", in Edgardo Sulis (ed.), Processo alla borghesia, Roma: Edizioni Roma, pp. 51–70.
  16. ^ Émile Zola, Le Rougon-Macquart (1871–1893).
  17. ^ a b Walter Benjamin, The Halles Project.
  18. ^ Gilbert, Dennis (1998). The American Class Structure. New York: Wadsworth Publishing. 0-534-50520-1.
  19. ^ Williams, Brian; Stacey C. Sawyer, Carl M. Wahlstrom (2005). Marriages, Families & Intimate Relationships. Boston, MA: Pearson. 0-205-36674-0.
  20. ^ Molière, ed. Warren 1899
  21. ^ see this review by Roger Ebert
  22. ^ Kinder (ed.) 1999
  23. ^ Howard Zinn. A People’s History of the United States (1980)
  24. ^ Beckert, S. 2001 "Propertied of Different Kind: Bourgeoisie and Lower Middle Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States" in Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston (eds.)

Further reading

External links

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