It does not seem on its face such a terrible way to live. It does not seem inconsistent with the virtues. Yet the very word “bourgeois” has been for a long time, I repeat, an embarrassment. In 1935 the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga noted that, “in the nineteenth century, ‘bourgeois’ became the most pejorative term of all, particularly in the mouths of socialists and artists, and later even of fascists.”[1]
We should try to redeem the word, and through it rediscover a virtuous middle class. In actual fact middle-class people have not been monsters. Their sworn enemies, from Lenin to Pol Pot, Abimael Guzman, and Osama Bin Laden, commonly have been. Middle-class virtuousness arises not merely when an occasional saintly bourgeoise overcomes the entailments of her social position and joins the Communist Party. A bourgeois social position, if properly tutored by education, draws out the virtues.
But the trouble is that “bourgeois” is used by the left to evoke the alleged ethical bankruptcy of the middle class. On some tongues it has come to mean “bossy, greedy, selfish, vulgar, sexist, patriarchal, fascist, snobbish, elitist, common, American, Midwestern, small-town, philistine, ignorant, uneducated, unethical, conventional, self-satisfied, uncharitable, hypocritical, imperialistic, undemocratic, militaristic, authoritarian, materialistic, and inegalitarian.” The word therefore makes non-leftists uneasy. They worry that they are accepting in the word some nasty conclusions in no way obviously correct about owners and managers of the means of production.
The uneasiness of non-leftists, or of others merely puzzled by a phrase such as “the bourgeois virtues,” shows up in Simon Schama’s book, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987). On page 6 he announces his ambition to “rescue the Netherlands from its ancient stereotype as quintessentially bourgeois.” He has in mind Huizinga, and behind him the irritated assessments of the place by aristocratic foreigners, starting with Philip II’s Duke of Alva and Elizabeth’s Earl of Leicester.
Using the word “bourgeois,” he writes, perpetuates “the deadening cliché that tells us at once too much and not enough. . . . The result is a kind of depressing historical perennialism by which the Dutch, being bourgeois, were whatever the modern mind supposes bourgeois to be,” which is to say, bossy, greedy, selfish, vulgar, etc. He therefore wants another word for his beloved Nederlanders. “At the center of the Dutch world,” he declares, “was a burgher, not a bourgeois.” Rousseau in 1762 put it similarly, distinguishing a citoyen from a bourgeois.[2]
That is, Schama wants a word uncorrupted by the sneers of the left, beginning with Rousseau. Schama wants to honor the Northern-Lowlandish townspeople of the 17th century without implying that they were “bourgeois” in the corrupted sense of the word. “The burgher was a citizen first,” you see, “and Homo economicus second. . . . If any one obsession linked together the [burgerij’s] concerns . . . it was the moral ambiguity of good fortune,” that embarrassment of riches.
The word “bourgeois” in its Marxist dress is to be rejected because it has become merely a synonym for Homo economicus, the man of untroubled selfishness which by now left and right agree in believing is the essence of middle-class life. The bourgeois in this belief is a machine for making (as it is always put) endless profit—profit by blessed invention if you are of the right, or profit by damned exploitation if you are of the left.
Early in the last long chapter in the book Schama lets himself go. The word “bourgeois”
after all, belongs to the classifying vocabulary of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century materialist social science that assumed systems of belief to be appendages of social power. Those frameworks of cultural analysis are notorious for their reductive insistence on a social continuum that extends from the division of labor to the destination of the soul.[3]
Schama can’t bring himself to utter the word “Marxist.” Ideas are not to be reduced to Marxist social class. “If my view is somewhat idealist, the opposite view is often unreflectingly materialistic.”[4]
Schama is right to reject the theory shared by left and right in which for example the “realism” of Golden-Age painting is supposed to be “some sort of clodlike bourgeois adhesion to the concrete.”[5] If the supposition were true it would be hard to explain the bourgeois enthusiasm for Impressionist, or for that matter post-Impressionist, or for that matter Abstract Expressionist, painting. Being bourgeois, Schama and I agree, is not the same thing as being stupidly literal and ethically corrupt. That’s the point of my own book, too, as of Schama’s: to celebrate the “bourgeois virtues”—if Schama would but accept the word.
Buying, selling, owning and operating, managing, planning, advising, persuading, inventing, designing, inquiring, reporting, educating, researching, exploring, calculating, accounting, defending, prosecuting, judging, curing, helping, regulating, governing in Amsterdam and in New Amsterdam, in market work and in housework, in the 17th century and now, does not automatically produce ethical salvation. But neither does it automatically produce ethical damnation. It is a life of navigating between the sacred and the profane.
“To be a Dutch burgher,” Schama declares, “meant avoiding being either godless or helpless.”[6] I agree. “Money-making, which the Calvinist Church so detested, was tolerated by distinguishing between proper and improper ways of making fortunes, and the concept of wealth as stewardship.”[7] The left could here note sarcastically, and accurately, that in the 17th century “proper stewardship “ included piracy, slave trading, and colonial exploitation. “To be Dutch,” he concludes, “still means coming to terms with the moral ambiguities of materialism,” now as in the Golden Age.[8] Yes.
But coming to terms with the moral ambiguities of materialism is the life of any bourgeois person, Dutch or Florentine, American or English, Japanese or South Asian. The early Medici bankers, two centuries before Schama’s Dutch, writes Tim Parks, faced the same problem in ethical mechanics. “Precisely because [Cosimo il Vecchio] cares about his eternal soul he is aware of a fierce tension between the competing demands of the sacred and the secular. A rich and powerful man who is also a devout Christian must needs be anxious.”[9] Such a bourgeois anxiety, Parks notes, would not describe the late Medici, by that time aristocratic dukes rather than high-bourgeois bankers.
You can’t be rich and be loved, they say. The superstition is that to get rich you have to steal. Even the rich half believe it. The anxiety of the rich middling sort has been famous in social theorizing for a century, since Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, as Schama notes. It was lively in 18th-century writing on social ethics, too, such as that of Montesquieu and Adam Smith commending the bourgeoisie. And the anxiety-producing tension between the sacred and the profane has been an obsession in Christianity since the Sermon on the Mount.
A hungry peasant or a well-heeled aristocrat has, as we say, no issues with money and consumption. It’s “eat black bread every chance you get” or “endow St. Paul’s with stained glass.” No issues there. But the middenstand live with the moral ambiguities of materialism. They have so very much of that matter, after all, and know how it was earned. Should a tithe for my church be reckoned before or after taxes? Is it hubris for Silas Lapham to build a vulgar house in the Back Bay? Should Emma Woodhouse persuade Harriet not to marry a mere farmer?
If the bourgeois Dutch nowadays excuse their wealth with good works such as the expedition to Srebrenica, so do bourgeois Americans now, who attend church for this purpose in startling numbers, and who like the Dutch embark on errands of mercy abroad which they sometimes do not have the aristocratic courage or peasant faithfulness to finish. In the great days of bourgeois Florence and Venice the churches themselves were lusciously decorated in expiation for the taking of interest and the taking of advantage. Parks instances the tomb and old sacristy in the Church of San Lorenzo commissioned from Brunelleschi and Donatello by Cosimo’s father, the founder of the bank.[10] The guilt and pride of the bourgeoisie has festooned our cities.
As Schama himself conceded, “the tensions of a capitalism that endeavored to make itself moral were the same whether in sixteenth-century Venice, seventeenth-century Amsterdam or eighteenth-century London.”[11] That is the right tactic for reforming the our discussions about the rise of the bourgeoisie: namely, to note and analyze its ethical tensions. The mistake is to flee from the very word “bourgeois” because some people use it to mean “bad bosses,” or indeed from the word “ethics” because some people use it to mean “inessential rules of business just short of indictable crimes,” or “morality” because some people use it to mean “puritanical, sex-obsessed hypocrisy.”
Schama has a fascinating chapter on housewifery. Why do the Dutch scrub their stoops? Why in Dutch but not in other Germanic languages is the word for “clean” the same as the word for “beautiful”? The Japanese, by the way, are similar. Among both people, and not among their neighbors, “cleanliness” = “beauty,” and so “be beautiful” makes sense as an ethical command: be clean, which anyone can achieve. Such an aesthetic can perhaps be traced in the restraint of Japanese domestic architecture and the similarly “clean” lines of high modernism, in which the Dutch came to excel.
Schama notes that the importance of The Home to bourgeois society was “not of course peculiar to the Netherlands.”[12] “The family household,” he writes, “was the saving grace of Dutch culture that otherwise would have been indelibly soiled by materialism.”[13] Note the image of soiling by contact with the world. The moral ambiguity of compromise in the market is seen as dirty, touching a hundred hands. The Dutch home has soap and towels and moral clarity. The market entails carefully judged degrees of trust, orders of ability, the relativity of a price. At home the man retreats to the sacred absolutes of love, obligation, power. We say it is his castle, Het Slot, where he is no longer required to calculate and deal.
In 1652 Owen Felltham stood amazed at the houses of Flanders, “the best eye beauties of their country,” of which “their lining is yet more rich than their outside; not in hangings [that is, tapestries] but in pictures, which even the poorest are there furnished with.” In probate inventories we learn of deceased Netherlanders of quite ordinary bourgeois status leaving hundreds of paintings. A blacksmith would literally hang an oil paintings on the wall beside his forge. Over a million paintings, it has been reckoned, poured out of the workshops of Holland in the Golden Age.
“Their houses they keep cleaner than their bodies,” Felltham notes with disdain, and then adopts a Cavalier and Anglican Protestant and English haughtiness in asserting further that the Catholic Flemings keep “their bodies [cleaner] than their souls.”[14] No: the cleaning of bodies and houses and front stoops is soul-cleansing, too, said the Dutch and Flemings. The northern European bourgeois home is not in truth a “castle.” It is a temple. Compare the spiritual character of personal hygiene and house cleaning among the Japanese—though there the custom is not at all of modern or bourgeois origin.
“The effort to moralize materialism” is told in the Netherlands, of course, in characteristically Dutch ways, which Schama persuasively illustrates. The word over-vloed, for example, means “abundance, copia.” But the literal meaning, “over flood,” put Dutch people in mind of sea water surging onto the rich but low-lying provinces of Holland and Zeeland—”Zeeland” means “sea land” claimed from and bravely facing the waves. The image reminded self-critical Calvinists of overwhelmed dikes every ten years or so, now here, now there, with gigantic regional disasters remembered for generations every century or so, Saint Elizabeth’s Day in 1421, for example, 72 villages in Zeeland abruptly engulfed in a night, over 100,000 people drowned; or latterly, January 31, 1953. A famous modern poem speaks of eeuwigen rampen/ gevreesd en gehoord, “eternal disasters feared and heard.” Flooding of water figures repeatedly in worries about an over-flood of riches.
Material abundance seems like such a force of nature, crushing all. Nothing is more abundant than the sea. To be deprived by overflooding riches of the necessity to work was bad, not good, because these were bourgeois, work-admiring people. Dutch has a terrifying word, kwelwater, the water that quietly seeps under an apparently sound dike. It is related in folk etymology to kwellen, “to torment, to torture.” A Calvinist, at any rate the rigorist predikant who after 1619 claimed precedence in religious affairs in the Republic, would readily extend it to the seeping corruptions of the soul. The Netherlanders’ “fear of drowning in destitution and terror [from water] was exactly counterbalanced by their fear of drowning in luxury and sin [from wealth].”[15] The Dutch stole the land from the sea, and worried about the counterclaim of nature, or of human nature. “Let us clean our stoops, and our souls,” they repeated uneasily as they worked.
But is the moral effort especially Dutch? Ik denk het niet. I don’t think the Dutch moralized their riches and other bourgeois do not.
The American bourgeoisie, for example, moralizes its riches as just rewards for cowboy courage, or as a gospel of philanthropy of the Carnegie/ Mellon type, or as a democratic creed of opportunity seized. The Hindu bourgeoisie moralizes its riches as the favor of Ganesha or the expression of spiritual worth from a previous reincarnation or as provisioning for those pesky cousins. As behavior, of course, a sheer materialism without sincere reference to the transcendent is common enough in all societies, bourgeois or not. But it is the official theory of none. Official theories are about the transcendent, a Beyond. Every human yearns for it.
Schama does not compare enough with other countries to make his case for Dutch exceptionalism. The same problem is seen among historians of the United States trying with exclusively American evidence to make a case for American exceptionalism. The very phrase “American exceptionalism,” it appears, arose in the 1920s in discussions among Communists as to why America did not respond to socialism in a manner comparable with Europe.[16] The exceptionalisms are founding myths.
The Dutch were not in fact exceptional in character, merely a little early compared to the English or the French and a little late compared with the Florentines and Venetians. The Low Countries north and south were the earliest northern European regions to be thoroughly citified.[17] In 1467 Charles, Duke of Burgundy, ruled over a town-rich region, matched only by northern Italy. In 1600 the northern Netherlands had 19 cities of over 10,000 population, as against only 6 in a Britain five or six times larger in total population.[18] One in four Dutch northerners, Jan de Vries reckons, lived in towns of 10,000 or larger in 1600, one in five in the Spanish Netherlands, that is, Belgium. Only one in seventeen Englishmen did.[19] The Low Countries were the first bourgeois society in the north. Bourgeois, I say—to preserve the comparison with other societies, such as our own.
That is one reason to keep the word “bourgeois.” It does not have to mean “egotistical wretch.” God or Nature or Humpty Dumpty does not determine what words mean. We do. “Bourgeois” can mean, if we wish to use words this way—and can get over being spooked by Marx—“city dweller practicing an honored profession or owning a business or functioning at a managerial level in someone else’s enterprise, including governmental and non-profit enterprises.”
Such a person faces a particular set of ethical problems. He has the anxious ethical task of learning how to be a counselor yet self-prudent, a salesman yet other-loving, a boss yet just, a bureaucrat yet courageous, a scientist yet faithful. Schama is right to emphasize the ethical tensions of capitalism. But the Dutch are merely an early instance, as the Venetians and Florentines and Genoese were still earlier, with the Hanseatic League in attendance, and Osakans and Singaporeans later, of a by-now worldwide social class and a by-now worldwide ethical problem, namely, the tensions of bourgeois-ness ascendant. Avoiding the very word in fear of its historical-materialist accretions doesn’t help. The way to refute historical materialism is to examine the material and spiritual facts, as Schama does. Avoiding the B word is no help.
Still, why not bow to the common prejudice and use instead “middle class” or “middling sort” or “the managerial/professional/upper-bureaucratic/upper-entrepreneurial class” or “SES I, II, and the higher-status members of III and IV,” or even Schama’s “burghers,” which is all I mean?
Well, I admit to a contrariness here, a wish to slow down the corruption of meaningful words. The word “rhetoric,” for example, which for two millennia meant “the offering of good reasons,” has been corrupted since the 17th century to become in English—less so in other European languages, I think—another of the very numerous English words for false speech. Let’s recover it. “Anarchism,” which means in Greek “without a ruler,” that is, without an all-powerful State, has been corrupted in American English since the late 19th century to become just another word for nihilistic bomb-throwing. Let’s recover it. And “feminism,” which meant at its coinage an advocacy for the flourishing of women, has been corrupted in some minds since the 1970s to become just another word for bra-burning man hating—thus the late Bob Hope: “Feminists burn their bras, then complain about lack of support.” Let’s recover it, too.
I want to recover the word “bourgeois” by taking it back from its enemies. The word “capitalist,” referring in the opinion of Communists in the 1880s to greedy monopolists of the means of production, was taken back in the 1980s to mean “advocates for and actors in free markets.” “Quaker” and “Tory” originated as sneers, but were calmly appropriated by the victims and made honorable.
In April of 1566 two hundred armed and Protestant-sympathizing aristocrats from the Low Countries presented a petition to Margaret of Parma, Catholic Philip’s regent in Brussels, urging her to grant religious tolerance. She was advised by one of her counselors to pay them no heed. They were merely, said he in his aristocratic French, “gueux,” that is, “beggars.” Never mind that the petitions were themselves French-speaking aristocrats.
The Netherlandish noblemen seized upon the word, and called themselves proudly thereafter Beggars, Dutch Geuzen. Baron Henry Brederode, their leader, was called Le Grand Gueux. That summer the new word was claimed too by the Protestant iconoclasts. “Vivent les Gueux,” the rioters cried in Antwerp, or perhaps “Leven de Geuzen,” as they trashed centuries of religious art. [20]
The word has remained alive in the Dutch language. A group in 1568 devoted to the murder of Catholic priests called itself the Bosgeuzen, Forest Beggars. The pirate navy which took Brill from the Spanish in 1572 called itself the Watergeuzen, Sea Beggars. The orthodox Calvinists marching to kill off toleration in 1616 called themselves the Mud Beggars. One of the illegal newspapers during the German occupation of the Second World War was De Geus, The Beggar. The normal Dutch word for such reversals of a sneer became geuzennamen, beggars-names.
I hope to make “bourgeois” a geuzennaam, to remake a word of contempt into a word of honor.
The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
[1] Huizinga, “Spirit of the Netherlands,” 1935 (1968), p. 111.
[2] On the Social Contract, Bk. I, Chp. VI, end, and footnote, in Basic Political Writings. Harvey points this out in Mansfield 2003, p. 9. Rousseau says in Footnote 4 that “Quand Bodin a voulu parler de nos citoyens et bourgeois, il a fait une lourde bévue en prenant les uns pour les autres“ (”When [Jean] Bodin wanted to speak of our citizens and bourgeois, he committed a terrible blunder in taking the one for the other”). http://un2sg4.unige. ch/athena/ rousseau/jjr_ cont.html#4.
[3] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 568.
[4] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 567.
[5] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 11.
[6] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 420.
[7] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 420.
[8] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 609.
[9] Parks, “Cosimos,” 2002, p. 76.
[10] Parks, “Cosimos,” 2002, p. 75.
[11] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 49.
[12] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 399.
[13] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 388.
[14] Felltham, A Brief Character of the Low Countries, 1652, quoted in Gross, The New Oxford Book of English Prose, p. 95f.
[15] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 47.
[16] Ross, 1995, “American Exceptionalism,” p. 22.
[17] De Vries, European Urbanization, 1984, pp. 270-77, cited in Maddison, World Economy, 2001, p. 54. compare, however, the northern Italians of bourgeois character in Milan, Venice, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Siena, and the like. In 1600 only Paris and London were in the club of over-100,000-population with Naples, Venice, Milan, Rome, and Palermo.
[18] Israel, Dutch Republic, 1995, pp. 115, 328; Maddison, World Economy, 2001, p. 54.
[19] De Vries, European Urbanization, 1984, pp. 30, 36, 39, and 46, quoted in Maddison, World Economy, 2001, p. 248.
[20] “Vivent les Gueux,” Israel, Dutch Republic, 1995, p. 148.
1) Geuzennaam is a marvelous, fabulous word. Thank you for that.
2) “Schama wants a word [for bourgeois] uncorrupted by the sneers of the left, beginning with Rousseau.”
But if he had one, and it gained currency, it would soon acquire the same sneers for the same reason.
3) "In 1935 the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga noted that, 'in the nineteenth century, "bourgeois" became the most pejorative term of all, particularly in the mouths of socialists and artists, and later even of fascists.'"
Even of fascists--even--as though fascists were not close cousins of the socialists and artists but rather some kind of opposite, which is exactly what socialists and artists think. This is often, as here, what producers think of their closest direct competitor.
I will admit that I do not like the word bourgeois, but I am trying to change my mind.