The Very Word "Bourgeois"

Continuing the occasional series of excerpts from the trilogy’s three volumes, I’m posting Chapter Two today.

“”Bourgeois virtues”? Consider then that first word. Yes, we are bourgeois, we educated folk, not aristocratic or proletarian. We are businesspeople or bureaucrats, not kings or peasants. Yet for a century and a half now the word has been a sneer, as in “Oh, Daddy, you’re so bourgeois!” or in Leadbelly’s song “Bourgeois Town“:

These white folks in Washington, they know how:

Treat a colored man just to see him bow.

Lawd, in a bourgeois town,

Hee! it’s a bourgeois town.

I got the bourgeois blues, gonna spread the news all around.[1]

At one time in French “bourgeois” meant without contempt merely “townsman-ly,” from a Germanic (not Latin) word for a walled town. It shows up in Edinburgh and the New York borough of Queens and, with Latin latro added on, a burglar, a thief preying on the town. It came itself from an Indo-European root, meaning “high.” So “belfry” from the Old French berfrei, a high place of freedom from attack. The tribe of Burgundi came from the high country of Savoy. The Norse berg, “mountain,” appears in Bergen, literally “the mountain,” and iceberg. All of the Germanic words, it says here in The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, revised and edited by Calvert Watkins, are cousins through their Proto-Indo-European grandparents with Latin words in fort-, such as “fort” and “fortitude,” or any strength.

Anyway bourgeois (boor-zhwa) is the adjective, describing Daddy, say, or the Long Island suburbs. It’s also in the French the noun for the singular male person, a burgher. Benjamin Franklin was “a bourgeois.” And strictly speaking in French, though odd-sounding in English, the plural men of the middle class go by the same word, those bourgeois trading news on the Rialto. The female burgheress, singular, adds an ­-e, bourgeoise (boor-zhwaz). Madame Bovary was a bourgeoise, and she and her friends bourgeoises, plural, with again no change in pronunciation. The whole class of such people are of course that appalling bourgeoisie (boor-zhwa-zee), whence H. L. Mencken’s sneering label, the “booboisie.”

Got it.

But consider this: in sociological fact you are probably a member of it. You may therefore still be using the word as a term of self-contempt, like the f-word for gays or the n-word for blacks. As Mencken also said, the businessman “is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.”[2]

After the Second World War the self-scorning of the middle class became a standard turn among even the non-Marxist clerisy, from C. Wright Mills to Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich wrote in Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989) of the bourgeoisie’s “prejudice, delusion, and even, at a deeper level, self-loathing.”[3] She would know about the self-loathing. Her father started as a copper miner (Ehrenreich was born in Butte) but became a corporate executive. She herself got a Ph.D. in biology, but was radicalized by Vietnam. So was I, incidentally, before my Ph. D. in economics took hold.

Self-loathing among the bourgeoisie has for a century and a half been a source of trouble. We need to rethink together the word and the social position. Guilt over success in a commercial society is for a victimless crime. Yet the children of the bourgeoisie seek an identity challenging that of their elders. The clerisy by which the children are taught accuses the middle class of inauthenticity, and plays on pseudo-aristocratic contempt for “middle” construed as “mediocre.” None of this makes very much sense. A commercial life can be as authentic and virtuous as that of a philosopher or priest. We need to recover its wholeness and holiness.

A reason to keep here the dishonored word “bourgeois” is to distinguish the rethinking from the statistical inquiries evoked by “middle class,” or the older “middling sort.” My focus is not mainly on how large the middle class actually was numerically speaking in 1600 or 1800 or now, although places where the middle class was exceptionally small, such as Russia in 1800, would perhaps be poor places to study bourgeois virtues. I’m not so sure of this. Certainly such places are interesting tests by absence. And one could I suppose have a bourgeois ideology active without an objectively large middle class. A Marxism attributing false consciousness to the majority of American working-class people who call themselves “middle class” would say so.

The townly and businesslike ideology evoked here by “bourgeois” occurs anciently in any city of trade, whether or not such attitudes come to rule the place. On the other hand, a large and ill-defined middle class such as America’s can dilute bourgeois virtues, contrary to expectations, importing dangerous nostalgias like the cowboy-and-detective myth. The samurai myth has done similar mischief in Japan.

The middle class is divided into three parts, which by no means always get along with each other. The haute or grande bourgeoisie is the class of the big bosses, the owners of large factory and department-store, the directors and other denizens of corporate boardrooms, the bankers and merchants of the grander sort. In Europe they have long run the cities. In Holland the urban upper class from the 15^th century on was called the de regenten, the regents. By the 17^th century some 2000 bourgeois ran the Dutch Republic.

In the United States the regents become in a few generations America’s so-called “aristocracy” and send their children to Andover and Yale—thus the Vanderbilts, descendent from a ferry-boy on Staten Island, or the Kennedy’s, from gangsters and ward bosses; or the Bushes from a more distinguished family, containing Princess Diana, George Washington, FDR, Hugh Hefner, Benedict Arnold, John Hinkley, Jr., and, of all people, John Kerry. Eventually a few thousand of the American “aristocracy” came to run the country, too, a power elite.

But “aristocracy” is a European word and concept. The United States never had a literal feudalism and therefore was unusually open to Lockean ideas of equal access to life, liberty, and property.[4] The power elite runs things, I repeat. But it is partly open, unlike the class of regents in 18^th-century Holland. Who in the virulently anti-Irish time of 1860 in America would have anticipated that after 1960 every American president except Ford would have some Irish ancestry?[5] With no feudalism, except for a while a real Dutch version in the Hudson Valley and briefly a faux version in the South, the U. S. of A. has had no literal nobility. Never mind the pretensions of Park Avenue and Newport, R. I.

The admirable Theodore Roosevelt, whose mother came from slaveholders in Savannah and whose father came from two centuries of Knickerbocker merchants and landowners in New York, was America’s closest approach to a real aristocrat among modern presidents, with his fifth cousin Franklin. Before that presidentially speaking you have to go back to the Adams clan or maybe William Henry Harrison for even a whiff of “aristocracy,” though almost all American presidents in the 19^th century were members of the clerisy—lawyers, mainly, like Nixon or Clinton in our day.

In thoroughgoing republics like America and Switzerland even the most haute of the bourgeoisie never quite make a true aristocracy.[6] Contrast England well into the 20^th century, with hundreds upon hundreds of Teddy-Roosevelt figures, but ones who were actual dukes and marquises, owning much of the country’s land rents, running company boards and staffing the Empire. The undertow of feudal privilege and the angry resistance to it can be felt now even in social democracies like Holland, which in fact never had much of an aristocracy. Some of Europe’s most social democratic parts still have kings and queens: Britain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands. The late Queen Mother Princess Julianna of the Netherlands said, “I come for the people, not for the directors.” And yet, compliments of the directors of Shell Oil, she was among the richest women in the world.

The second part of the bourgeoisie is the Coleridgian “clerisy,” what German historians have called the Bildungsbürgertum, the “education bourgeoisie,” and what has been called in Eastern Europe since the 19^th century the intelligentsia. That Europeans and their heirs kept making up praising or damning names for it—philosophes, Bildungsbürgertum, professionals, preachers, intelligentsia, intellectuals, Brahmins, mandarins, progressives, literati, illuminati, experts, brains trust, highbrows, egg heads, pointy heads, the best and the brightest, the chattering class, the talented tenth, the new class, the symbolic analysts, the creative class—testifies to its uneasy relation with the rest of society. The state bureaucrats of 18^th-century Prussia or the lawyers of 19^th-century Massachusetts or the college professors of 20^th-century California were neither aristocrats nor peasant nor proletarians, and so by a loose definition they were bourgeois.

Eric Hobsbawm disputes that in England there was in the 19^th century such a thing as a Bildungsbürgertum.[7] What is persuasive about his case is that the English clerisy was then small and, as he notes, did not follow party lines, as the Continental clerisy tended to do. England did not have until the 20^th century very many of the numerous high-status civil servants, among them party-line university professors, that Germany and France honored and multiplied in the 19^th century.

But even in England the clerisy was at least talky. In their study of the English middle class 1780-1850 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall observe that “lawyers, teachers, doctors, and above all the clergy and writers spent their lives manipulating words, explaining the middle class to itself.” They quote a writer on legal matters in the middle of the 19^th century asserting that “the professional classes. . . form the head of the great English middle class, keep up to the mark its standard of morality, and direct its intelligence.”[8] They overwhelmingly originated from the economic bourgeoisie—and from the literal clergy. Increasingly the “standard of morality” was critical of the fathers of the owning and managing bourgeoisie, to the advantage of the clerical sons wielding the pen.

We have a paradox at the outset here. Marx’s father was a lawyer, Engels himself a factory owner. French painters in the 19^th century were almost all from the bourgeoisie—with only an occasional Renoir from the working class or a Toulouse-Lautrec from the aristocracy. Yet the clerisy in its Romantic mood claimed a separate perch in the class system, separated especially from its parents of the bourgeoisie, a virtual papacy from which it issued bulls and excommunications. “How did it happen,” asked César Graña looking back on the mid-19^th-century treason of the clerisy, “that while one section of the bourgeoisie was efficiently gathering profits with unbending matter-of-factness, another was giving itself over to philosophical despair, the cult of sensitivity, and the enthronement of the nonutilitarian virtues?”[9]

By now the “creative class”—Richard Florida claims it is 30% of the American workforce, up from 10% in 1900—includes occupations once viewed as workingclass or, if especially profitable, mercantile. Think for example of painters in 17^th century Holland, who were apprentices or masters, poor or rich, but anyway mercantile.[10] Contrast the clerical and anti-market cast of modern painters. They chatter as much as they paint. Language is often as important in modern art as is the art work itself. One is always a little surprised at the smooth articulateness of modern painters, selling, selling. Often language becomes the art: “C’est ne pas une pipe.”

American and British journalists once thought of themselves as workingmen, mostly, right through World War II: Scoop or Front Page. Journalists on the Continent had a higher tone, and therefore priestly claims. A famous radical poem of Holland in the 1930s, written on a slow news day by such a journalist—Jan Gresshof; he was fired for printing the poem in his newspaper—speaks of the conservative wing of his colleagues of the clerisy, “de dominee, de dokter, de notaris,” the minister, the doctor, the lawyer-notary, who together strolled complacently on Arnhem’s town square of an evening. “There is nothing left on earth for them to learn,/ They are perfect and complete,/ Old liberals, distrustful and healthy.”[11]

Whether conservative or radical they are the Experts, of whom Harry Truman said, “An expert is someone who doesn’t want to learn anything new, because then he wouldn’t be an expert.” They are the chattering artists and the preaching intellectuals, too, experts in arts and ideas—though the average artist or professor after 1930s radicalism would be appalled to be classed with de dominee, de dokter, de notaris. That is the historical paradox, and the main worry in this book: a class genetically part of the bourgeoisie, and before 1848 sympathetic to it, has in its radicalism for a century and a half damned. . . the bourgeoisie.

The third part of the middle class is the petite bourgeoisie, the lower middle class, the owner of the corner grocery store, the lower middle manager, in former times the small but not subsistence farmer. Most Americans, as Europeans did not, put the upper working class in the bourgeoisie, and invited them into the bourgeois fraternal societies: the head clerk in the office, the electrician, the freight conductor, the chief sawyer.[12]

In his book The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (2003) Robert Johnston argues that the lower middle class has been tagged wrongly with the label of reaction. His Portland heroes such as Harry Lane, a U. S. senator who defended Joe Hill and voted against American entry into the Great War, or Lora Little, editor and an activist against conventional medicine, had all of them a touch of the clerisy. You can’t be an advocate without being easy with pen or speech. But they were advocates for the small proprietor against the expert, and did not join in the Progressive and bildungsbürgertumlich enthusiasm for top-down social engineering. Lane for example was eloquent against the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Johnston’s middle-class radicals wanted the little man and his wife to run things.

They were more hostile to the upper middle class, the “moneyed interest” above them, than to the blue-collar workers below them, from whom they often came. Such lower-middle-class folk were working stiffs. It was the non-working bond holders and the boodling politicians and the arrogant bureaucrats, the parasites on all working people, who evoked their wrath, à la Michael Moore. Damned right. Johnston notes that in the survey of Akron, Ohio residents in 1941 by Alfred Winslow Jones the lower middle class “sought a ‘middle ground’ between collectivism and absolute property rights.” The majority of Akron’s small business owners “believed that unemployed miners should steal coal to keep warm, that the Flint sit-down strike was proper, and that neighbors should prevent farm auctions and eviction of renters.”[13]arry

La grande bourgeoisie, the clerisy, la petite bourgeoisie: objectively bourgeois all.

One can be in science a lumper or a splitter, talking about chest and hip structures of the great apes in general or of humans in particular. Johnston is right that you can for some purposes usefully split the lower middle class from the rest, and study it comparatively. But of course the choice is pragmatic, depending on your purpose. If your purpose is Johnston’s, to rescue the lower middle class of our great-grandparents from demonization by historians of Nazi Germany like Arno Mayer, who on slender evidence have assigned fascism to shop owners, then you split.[14]

If your purpose is mine, to begin “redeeming the middling folk,” as Johnston puts it, all of them—though especially the non-intellectuals despised since 1848 by the clerisy—then you lump everybody from sweating assistant managers to glittering CEOs.

There’s no permanent thing out there in the world for all times and all purposes called “the middle class.” Social categories, no less than the anatomy of great apes, evolve, and furthermore what will matter about the categories to the social scientist depends on time and on human purposes. Statistics and other facts are relevant, but never come supplied with their own interpretation. Johnston cites on this point the great British student of the working class, E. P. Thompson, who argued that over a generation or two there are changes in the definition of “the working class.”[15] Likewise one can see in English history a bourgeoisie of subordination to the charter-granting power c. 1249 evolving into a bourgeoisie of confidence c. 1649, beheading an anointed king, and then c. 1949 evolving into a bourgeoisie of generality and even of honor.

We are all bourgeois now, a bourgeois apologist would say, or we should work on becoming so, because work after all is a good thing. Not a dishonor. That is the common element in any bourgeoisie, the honoring of work apart from manual drudgery or heroic daring. The European aristocracy delights rather in haughty idleness. As Stephen Greenblatt notes, in Shakespearean England “there was virtually no respect for labor; on the contrary, it was idleness that was prized and honored.”[16] Bourgeois work is dealing, managing, advising. It is verbal work, the speaking of ideas, the calculating of amounts, what you and I are doing now, for example. Note that well into the 20^th century in England the word “gentleman” meant “often, a man whose means enable him to live in easy circumstances without engaging in trade,” a man who did not need to work at anything.[17] “As for gentlemen,” writes one of them in Shakespeare’s time, “whosoever . . . can live idly and without manual labor. . . he shall be called master.”[18] The shift in the meaning of the word follows the spread of work-admiring middle-class values.

Unsurprisingly the word “gentleman” shifts away from the prizing and honoring of idleness first in bourgeois America. Everyone in the American middle class from the small-town plumbing contractor to the captain of industry admires purposeful, energetic work with words, and in a democratic spirit does not disdain helping out occasionally with the manual labor, either. Get busy! Even professors in America are businesspeople, as for instance Morris Zapp in David Lodge’s early academic novels, or Stanley Fish in real life. Busy, busy, busy. An American professor Does the Job, he says to himself proudly, whether the work is of brain or of hand. Get the Job Done. Henry Ford inspects the line. Sam Walton stocks the shelves.

The pretensions to leisure among the wives of the upper middle class has therefore been an embarrassment and a disability, cordoning them off from power. In the old days if the wife worked hard at housewifery or charitable works she was somewhat redeemed, at any rate in her own sphere, though still an object of fun in the style of Helen Hokinson cartoons in the old New Yorker. But eating bonbons has never been honored by the American bourgeoisie. Among the bourgeoisie a job of work is figured as autonomy and identity, adulthood and masculinity. In 1898 Charlotte Perkins Gilman celebrated “the demand in [even bourgeois] women not only for their own money, but their own work for the sake of personal expression. . . . Human labor is an exercise of faculty, without which we would cease to be human.”[19] Or at least we cease to be bourgeois humans, self-defining workers.

Victoria Thompson argues that in 19^th century France the bourgeois women were excluded by convention from making money in order to make that work honorable for their men. The bourgeois men were worried about their lack of aristocratic standing. Women’s production, the pride of French style, perfectly illustrated later by Coco Chanel, and still later in our New-World versions by Julia Child or Martha Stewart, was supposed to arise only from their devotion to consumption: les doigts de fée, the “fairy fingers,” of the woman “constituted an extension of her ‘natural’ feminine attributes rather than incursion into the [male, market, bourgeois] world.”[20] Hers wasn’t real work, though a fine, fine thing, you understand.

The economist Everett Hagen saw the high valuation of work as arising from the status anxieties of [male] English Dissenters and Lowland Scots in 17^th and 18^th century Britain and of impoverished samurai and prosperous merchants in late Tokugawa Japan. An aristocrat is the duke of so-and-so regardless of whether or not he has a go from time to time at soldiering or at estate management. The very word “aristocrat,” by the way, is a French Revolutionary coinage, out of the older and classical “aristocracy” and “aristocratic.” Homo ludens, the species of “playing man,” is an aristocratic or a peasant ideal of a life, weekends of aristocratic hunting and drinking chronicled in a novel by Woodhouse, or equally alcoholic weekends of proletarian soccer rioting in Amsterdam by yobs from Millwall or Sheffield United. Carefree. The aristocrat or proletarian is often portrayed in bourgeois fiction, which is most fiction, as unworried. At least that’s how it looks to a bourgeois worried about the next deal or the next deadline.

The proletarian or peasant sometimes feels driven to his work by the lash. He would rather not. And even when he exercises the proud excellence of a Silas in New Hampshire c. 1915 making a load of hay—”He bundles every forkful in its place,/ And tags and numbers it for future reference,/ So he can find and easily dislodge it/ In the unloading”—he is merely the hired man.

The bourgeois dream is different—to “be my own boss,” he says, working harder than when bossed by others. The owner-managers of American restaurants or American farms earn low pay per hour because they value so highly their busy autonomy on the job, 5:00 in the morning to 11:00 at night. In 2003 Robert Johnston pointed out that, after a long decline, the rate of self-employment in the American economy was growing. He quoted George Steinmetz and Erik Wright on its emotional significance: “at least a quarter of the total labor force, and a third of the male labor force, either is or has been self-employed.”[21]

And never mind the large additional percentage who have never in fact been self-employed and never actually will be, but have an unreasonable hope they will be self-employed in the future. The bourgeois thinks of himself as entrepreneurial, and especially in America he admires such go-getting, even if he has had in fact a routine career as an employee in a great corporation or a big government office. Napoleon is supposed to have said that his ordinary soldier carried the baton of a marshal of France in his kit bag. Thus a military career open to talents. The American middle manager thinks the same way, and has only a slightly larger chance of actually putting his baton to use.

Property, too, is admired and sought among the bourgeoisie, of course. Acceptance of property rights is shared with the aristocracy. No trespassing. This is mine. I get to use it up if I wish. It has been noted often, from Virgil in his Georgics to Thomas Jefferson in his letters, that having property lends respect, and even self-respect. “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens,” wrote Jefferson. “They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests, by the most lasting bonds.”[22] Owning is a Good Thing. Thus Bush II and his “ownership society,” at least in its words.

Great-souled gestures of consumption, giving to the church, a granite counter-top for the remodeled kitchen, a summer home in Wisconsin, that third car, the Republican Party, are shared with the aristocrats, too. Since most of the bourgeoisie do not actually know how the aristocrats spend their wealth, the symbolizing of prestige is imitated mainly from other, somewhat grander bourgeois. This is Pierre Bourdieu’s point in his exploration of class and consumption in France, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979). Spending property on hobbies and education and status-affirming toys helps make bourgeois people who they are. Everyone of means, they will say to themselves, has an elaborate gas grill under a green cover for the rain. We must have one, too. Everyone of means gives to the church. We must give, too.

But bourgeois property is different from that of the aristocrat or peasant. It is neither the easy inheritance claimed by the aristocrat nor the overused commons claimed by the peasant. It is not a given, zero-sum lump, as these two are. It is bound up, again, with a vision of freely-chosen work. Bourgeois property is at least in fable remade every generation, like the tools of a guildsman. “Human capital” is a modern bourgeois’ idea of skill. When Theodore Schultz, the inventor of the concept in economics, visited an Alabama farm family in the late 1940s he wondered to the mother and father about its poverty in run-down hog pens and an unpainted house. The mother replied in effect, “No, you are mistaken, Professor Schultz. We are not poor. We are rich: we purposely ran down the farm in order to invest in the education of our four children, all the way through college. That’s where our treasure is.”

Like a college education, property in home ownership is a sign of middle-class status in the United States, a modern version of the Jeffersonian and Roman republican idea of farm ownership as citizenship. The education and the home are not literally inherited, at least (again) in fable. They are bought during each bourgeois life, working for the mortgage, paying off the loans.

With the workers the bourgeoisie shares a resentment of the Great and Good, as they are called jeeringly in bourgeois England, and shares an eagerness to read about their fall. The petite bourgeoisie especially, most of all in egalitarian places like Australia or America, regards the political or corporate bosses as mafia dons, war lords, smooth-skinned thieves. Thus a shopkeeper in Santa Fe describes the sales tax, as he calculates it, as “5% for the governor.” The hostility to their betters among the bourgeoisie is sometimes matched by a contempt for their inferiors, and such a mix does have fascist possibilities. But the better angels of the bourgeoisie are genially populist, like Clarence the angel to George Bailey the savings-and-loan banker in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Equality, property, and honorable verbal work, helping out with the manual work at the crisis, these three abide. But the greatest of these is honorable work.

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.

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[1] Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, “Bourgeois Blues,” 1937 (copyright 1959 Folkways Music Publisher, Inc.).

[2] Mencken, “Types of Men,” 1922.

[3] Quoted in Johnston, Radical Middle Class, 2003, p. 5, which contains a good analysis of the phenomenon of the anti-bourgeois bourgeoisie.

[4] Hartz, Liberal Tradition, 1955, following Tocqueville.

[5] Murphy, “American Presidents,” 2004.

[6] On Switzerland, see Kocka, “The European Pattern,” 1988 (1993), p. 26.

[7] Hobsbawm, “ English Middle Class,” 1988 (1993), pp. 134, 138, 145.

[8] Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 1987, p. 264.

[9] Graña, Bohemian vs. Bourgeois, 1964, p. 17.

[10] Florida, Creative Class, 2002, p. 332.

[11] Reprinted and translated in Horst, Low Sky, 1996, p. 142. The poem was called “Liefdesverklaring,” or “Love-Declaration.”

[12] In such matters the Dutch were perhaps a little more democratic even before the War than, say, the English or the French. Accompanying the representatives of the Bildungsbürgertum on their evening stroll in Gresshof’s poem was a representative from the petite bourgeoisie, “en ‘t klerkje dat vandaag wat vroeger klaar is,“ “and a little clerk who today is finished a bit early.”

[13] Johnston, Radical Middle Class, 2003, p. 28.

[14] See Johnston’s review of the critics of the Lasswell-Lipset-Mayer theory of petit bourgeois reaction, Chp. 6 of Radical Middle Class.

[15] Johnston, Radical Middle Class, 2003, p. 13.

[16] Greenblatt, Will in the World, 2004, p. 76.

[17] Remember: unattributed word-lore is from The Oxford English Dictionary.

[18] Quoted in Greenblatt, Will in the World, 2004, p. 77.

[19] Gilman, Women and Economics, 1898, p. 157.

[20] Thompson, Virtuous Marketplace, 2000, p. 174.

[21] Quoted in Johnston, Radical Middle Class, 2003, p. 264.

[22] Jefferson to John Jay 23 August 1785, http:// wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_to_ John_Jay_-_ August_23,_1785.