Bourgeois

From Hobson's Choice

A term used to refer to the class that derives its income chiefly from the ownership and management of capital. For most of the history of capitalism it has been assumed, naturally, that the bourgeois represents the ruling class under capitalism. Under Marxist theory, the essence of capitalism is rule by the bourgeois—a "class dictatorship," as it were, in which the bourgeois preserves its hegemony through forcible domination over the other classes.

The term bourgeois is French, and refers to a citizen of the cities that enjoyed imperial privileges in medieval Europe. Gradually, it came to refer to the owners of factories and money lenders, who naturally were concentrated in cities. With the Industrial Revolution, the bourgeois were identified with the parvenus who controlled all of the mechanized factories. Because of their relentless obsession with commercial success over all other considerations, the term "bourgeois" became associated with squalor in the midst of great wealth. The origins of the word in common urban citizenship were abandoned by classical Marxists and other critics of capitalism; however, among non-Marxists the term tended to remain associated with the middle class.^[1] A plausible explanation of this confusion is that the bourgeois as a class left a dramatic imprint on the concept of normal behavior and appropriate social objectives.

1 Context
2 The Bourgeoisie
3 The Rise of the Bourgeoisie
4 Notes
5 See Also
6 External Links

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Context

The conventional narrative of economics and Western history is that liberalization of economic life led naturally and ineluctably to the industrial revolution, the accumulation of product capital, and rising standards of living. The immense power of business managers was actually the mere expression of their liberty as people with natural rights of ownership. Political opposition to the owners and managers of business, viz., socialism and Communism, were misguided fools who sought to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. In the fullness of time, the magic of capital accumulation lifted living standards for everyone, which explains the historic decline of economic radicalism of all types, and the complete political triumph of capitalism.

Because of the isotropic, hydraulic, and homeostatic nature of the economy that classical & neoclassical economics assumes, there was no place for "class" in economic analysis. There was also, by the same token, no place for power. Business managers had no real power; their influence, such as it was, arose from a Hobbesian social contract. Workers accepted the manager as a sort of primer inter pares because he insured the comparative success and concomitant survival of the firm for which they all worked. According to economists such as Nassau W. Senior, the peculiar wealth and control the capitalist enjoyed over the process of production was the result of primitive capital accumulation, achieved over a long period of abstinence from consumption. A definitive feature of capitalism was therefore the idea that, since the accumulation of capital led to a raising of the standard of living, it logically followed that those who accumulated capital were entitled to the greatest possible measure of reward for this abstinence.

Departing from the fictional world of classical economics, it needs to be acknowledged that the parvenus of early capitalism were nearly always merchants who won special state dispensations allowing them monopoly power over the resources and income streams of production. While industrialists did indeed accumulate capital, they did so via extraordinary access to credit, royal patents, community subsidies in the form of enclosures, and something else. Gradually, they accumulated the power to control the options and lives of workers, making it virtually impossible for workers to escape debt peonage, binding them to factories, and reducing real wages to below subsistence. In some cases, as under the Speenhamland Law, the gap was made up with subsidies for the indigent; in other cases, workers were literally worked to death. Certainly it was usually impossible for 19th century laborers to "abstain" from consumption sufficiently to become capitalists themselves. In this way, the urban worker was frequently reduced to the status of proletariat.

Exceptions exist: Andrew Carnegie escaped the deadly cycle of wage slavery by emigrating to the United States; as it happened, wages were often so high in North America that workers could indeed become petit bourgeois. A common fallacy is to assume that because social mobility existed, especially among the extremely gifted or in anomalous circumstances, that the concept of class stratification is a myth. The cruelties of the industrial revolution were much like those of war, natural disaster, and plague: it was almost random who was spared, and who was sucked under.

Nineteenth century Europe was wracked by severe economic crises, including five trans-European depressions. This stratified classes in Europe into a definite parvenu-bourgeois, a middle class of civil servants and petit bourgeois, and proletariats. Those who were reduced to being completely outside the social order were known as lumpen,

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The Bourgeoisie

In common vernacular, the term "bourgeoisie" is used almost synonymously with "bourgeois." As one might expect, both words have such a broad range of potential meanings. The Columbia Dictionary emphasizes the middle class "philistine" character of the bourgeois; the name for the class itself is "bourgeoisie." Yet the middle class were only bourgeois to the extent that they were culturally influenced by them. They borrowed their notions of natural liberty and expansion, their combination of nationalist self-congratulation and consumerist piety, and their hypocritical public oratory, but they remained a class apart, and subject to resentment of the "real" bourgeois.

This site seeks to develop a consistent usage that makes sense. Clearly it will not do to use "bourgeois" as a fancy word for the middle class. That destroys the historical information present in the use of the word by writers like Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt. On the other hand, the term cannot be so amorphous that it refers to the ruling class in all non-Communist systems of economic management, as Marx seems to imply. Some parvenus were bourgeois, but the parvenus were never able to govern either Europe or North America. It seems reasonable to conclude that the bourgeois were in large measure an historical class; they declined in numbers and political importance, especially on the eve of World War I. Like a ruling dynasty, they were defined by historic facts: they were a group of people set apart by their economic role, and roped off by the extreme penury of their employees, by the failure of many businesses (plunging their owners into poverty, suicide, or the middle class); and characterized initially by a complete lack of social grace, but later by defining what social grace meant. A combination of technology and inbreeding tended to attenuate the bourgeois, and they have since been superseded by the corporate civil service. They have not been replaced, since new entrants are essentially excluded by virtue of the character of modern business enterprise: today's parvenus are merely rich, and do not constitute a class apart in taste or manners.^[2]

There remains the question of the term "bourgeoisie." This site distinguishes between the term "bourgeois," meaning a proper name of a group that has largely vanished, leaving behind a peculiar cultural tradition; and "bourgeoisie" for the power structure that sustained the bourgeois. The latter represented not merely a set of specific habits, attributes, and economic roles, but also the political institutions that actually enabled the development of bourgeois civilization. The epitome of this was the oligarchy of 19th century Europe, the jingoistic nationalism, and the sanctimony of riches that characterized that epoch.^[3]

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The Rise of the Bourgeoisie

Historians have vociferously disputed the trajectory of the bourgeoisie. Naturally there is slippage in the definition, with Marxian historians tending to the position that the bourgeoisie is a functional byproduct of capitalism, and others tending to treat it as a cultural phase or even as the middle class (in the modern sense of educated management). This site, as mentioned, treats the bourgeois as a specific group limited in location and time, rather than as a strictly common noun. The bourgeois itself evolved over time, becoming more like an aristocracy of industry as its economic and political role was attenuated. It has been superseded by a business management that has no aesthetic resemblance to the high or middle bourgeois, and not much affinity for the early bourgeois either. The early bourgeois had little access to mechanical power; early firms under the bourgeois were typically ateliers, with roomfuls of journeymen or apprentices. Usually, the transformation of the bourgeois from technical elites over a small pool of skilled craftsmen, to business elites with a large laborforce of semi-skilled factory workers, was initiated by the state for the purpose of arming the military.^[4] An interesting twist to this: while books like A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) cultivate the impression that the French Revolution included a sanguinary class war of the poor against the rich (echoed in the Wall Street Journal's use of a guillotine icon for its occasional columns on "class warfare"), the opposite was true: while the nobility were spared, provided they did not conduct espionage against France or undertake insurgencies to restore the monarchy, workers who struck for more pay were not. Curiously, the Thermidorian Reaction did not affect this: with the abolition of the Committee for Public Safety, the arsenals that had armed France for victory in the desperate Revolutionary Wars were now "privatized," or bequeathed to some clever and opportunistic managers. Thus was born the parvenu element of France's bourgeois.

Using the French Revolutionary regime as a canonical, but by no means unique, example: under the Republic, enlightenment economists like James Steuart and Adam Smith became very highly respected. Under the influence of Steuart (if not his pupil, Smith), the French state adopted a system of selective tariffs, designed to actually cultivate industry.^[5] The moral of the story was that, exactly in so far as it served the interests of the bourgeois, and not one jot more or less, the state under the radical government adopted measures consonant with classical ideas of liberty.

In England, the rise of the bourgeois occurred while fighting a bourgoeisie-dominated state in France. Especially after the 1815 defeat of Napoleon, the English state became intensely devoted to its mercantile and managerial elite.^[6] The main contribution of the English bourgeois to the development of capitalism was their philosophy of classical liberalism, in which capitalism was nothing more than trade, and was the natural state of mankind.

After the period of the French Revolutionary wars, the nations of Europe were bound together in a way that had not been since the Protestant Reformation. Instead of rival continental empires thrashing each other, there had been a brief epoch of revolutionary war that ended with the states exhausted and the classes polarized. The aristocracy was to become wholly dependent upon their bourgeoisie, or (in the case of Germany), the Junkers. The British aristocracy had become dependent upon the upper (parvenu) bourgeois, while the lower bourgeois demanded a reform of the elaborate system of colonial rule. The parvenus tended to preserve the vitality of England's aristocracy by infusing fresh blood into it, and embracing its interests. The lower bourgeois tended to make common cause with the middle classes, such as embracing abolitionism, free trade, and the 1832 Reform Act.^[7] Opposition to the old style of colonial rule in North America and India was followed by a classical liberal embrace of the new free trade imperialism, in which Britain and France launched an intense campaign to "liberate" the world's economy by subjecting it free trade and direct management by the Trans-European industrial system.

According to some writers, the rise of imperialism was wholly contrary to the natural logic of bourgeois ascendancy.^[8] In fact, the logic was complex. John A. Hobson scarcely ever mentioned the bourgeoisie in his wide-ranging writings; despite writing the indispensible work on imperialism (Imperialism), he never mentions the bourgeois in it at all. The closest he gets is here:

Seeing that the Imperialism of the last three decades is clearly condemned as a business policy, in that at enormous expense it has procured a small, bad, unsafe increase of markets, and has jeopardised the entire wealth of the nation in rousing the strong resentment of other nations, we may ask, "How is the British nation induced to embark upon such unsound business?" The only possible answer is that the business interests of the nation as a whole are subordinated to those of certain sectional interests that usurp control of the national resources and use them for their private gain. This is no strange or monstrous charge to bring; it is the commonest disease of all forms of government. The famous words of Sir Thomas More are as true now as when he wrote them: "Everywhere do I perceive a certain conspiracy of rich men seeking their own advantage under the name and pretext of the commonwealth."
[Imperialism], I.IV.1

Hobson, as a classical liberal-turned-modern liberal, regarded class struggle as a false lead at best, and charlatanism at worst. The bourgeois were merely another group of people intent on maximizing their best interests. Only a small proportion benefited from imperialism anyway; as for the rest, they were stimulated by irrational motives which they could be educated out of. (In the event, this can be justly said to be true, as we shall presently see).

By the 1870's the bourgeoisie of Britain and the rest of Europe had rallied around economic liberalism, nationalism, and imperialism. In the USA, the bourgeois had suffered a curious form of setback, however: firstly, a major segment of the Usonian bourgeois was involved in a defeated effort to secede from the Union (see US Civil War); the victorious section of the Usonian bourgeois were mostly involved in investment banking, and were turning to the creation of industrial planning and management bureaucracies.^[9] Initially, these mainly acted as force multipliers, allowing US firms to employ bureaucracies of unprecedented size and promulgate their world view among the middle classes with historic speed and thoroughness.^[10] However, the immense size and technical complexity of the US industrial firms led to the gradual replacement of the Usonian bourgeois as a managerial class. This was replaced by a bureaucracy, or corporate civil service, which not only managed the technical processes of designing and manufacturing products, but also developed the business strategy and capital structure for the firms that employed them—functions usually carried out by a bourgeois.

By the 1920's the corporate managerial bureaucracy had become commonplace in the USA, and was highly resilient. It weathered the recession of 1919-1921, and was distinguished for its ideological optimism: as a matter of principle, the corporate civil service systematically cultivated a professional outlook of optimism about the prospects of capitalism in general and the firm in particular. As a consequence, when the Great Depression struck, big business was not driven en bloc to finance hard right totalitarian leaders, as it was on the European continent.^[11] ^[12] ^[13] In contrast, while the USA's wealthy elites were often fascist sympathizers, and may have even dabbled in ersatz Bonapartism,^[14] the actual business management was indifferent to fascism (or falangism) and saw no need for a dictatorship.

The liquidation of the Axis Powers in 1945 left the bourgeois of those nations in a precarious position. Their labor forces would have been purged of radical organizers, but the survivors would have a recollection of their now-defeated bosses having orchestrated those purges. On the other hand, the British, French, and Usonian occupation forces were committed to preserving market economies, and were very light-handed in the prosecution of corporate criminals in the War. Hjalmar Schacht, for example, Hitler's pre-chancellorship patron, was tried and acquitted at Nuremberg despite having made the necessary plans for the management of rearmament and war.^[15] The postwar dispensation actually left several fascist-era institutions intact, such as IRI in Italy. The old fascist structure for state-supervised main bank coordination of business management in Europe was preserved and actually strengthened, as the practical alternative to the creation of a Usonian-style corporate civil service.

Since the bourgeois was chastened by its attempts to rule through a praetorian state, and politically isolated in the former Axis states, it was to regard the government-sanctioned role of main banks as a sort of savior. While the corporate bureaucracies of the United States and elsewhere tend to regard the government as wholly adversarial and superfluous, in postwar Europe they were generally regarded as having saved the bourgeoisie from either liquidation (as collaborators and class enemies) or from competitive obliteration by Usonian multinationals. However, since the 1970's the Usonian system of business management, with copious improvements, has largely replaced the bourgeois.

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Notes

↑ Amazingly, there exists no authoritative definition of the word. Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (Harvest Books, 1949) places the origins of fascist totalitarianism in the "political emancipation of the bourgeoisie," but is vague about who this group comprised. Max Weber likewise seems to have refrained from criticizing or embracing the Marxian connotation of "bourgeois" as capitalist parvenu. But he identifies himself ("The Nation State and Economic Policy," anthologized in The Political Writings of Max Weber) as bourgeois, despite the fact that he was only so in the vernacular, non-Marxian sense: his father was a civil servant.
↑ In 19th century Europe, on the other hand, there was an actual rite of passage for admission into the bourgeois. In some cases this took the form of a series of hurdles, such as intermarriage with the aristocracy. In other cases, there were actual societies that required peer-approval for admission. See, for example, Carol E. Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford University Press (1999), esp. "Emulation: Class, Gender, and Context" p.2ff.
↑ This usage is not universally accepted, and we do not pretend that it is. For a work whose author would no doubt reject this usage, see Robert W. Stern, Changing India: Bourgeois Revolution on the Subcontinent, Cambridge University Press (2006). Stern cites Barrington Moore, Jr.'s use of the term "bourgeois revolution" as the simultaneous adoption of both capitalism and parliamentary democracy. This seems ahistorical, by claiming the European bourgeoisie was democratic—it was not; and the phrase smacks of Madison Avenue abuse of the term "revolution" to refer to sudden change. Catchy, but not rigorous. Besides, India's democracy developed explicitly in opposition to capitalism; it was only as democracy was subverted that capitalism took root in that nation.
↑ In France: Henry Heller, [The Bourgeois Revolution in France, 1789-1815], Berghahn Books (2006), p.97ff. Accounts of Meiji industrialization in Japan likewise feature the role of military strength in the creation of an industrial base.
↑ Heller, p.98.
↑ Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, Verso (1991), has the brilliant and startling insight that, while England is the premier capitalist nation, it became capitalist in a detour around its bourgeois, through the medium of its landed aristocracy and in the countryside.
Yet although England was the world's first capitalist systme, Western culture has produced a dominant image of capitalism to which the English experience fails to conform: a true capitalism is essentially an urban phenomenon, and the true capitalist is by origin a merchant, a bourgeois. Besides, the capitalist economy in England originated in the countryside, dominated by the feudal aristocracy, it is, at least according to some versions of this dominant model, imperfect, immature, inadequately modern and, above all, peculiar-a kind of bastard capitalism, with a pre-modern state and antiquated ruling ideologies. England may have been the first and even the first industrial capitalism, but it reached its destination by a detour, almost by mistake, constitutionally weak and in unsound health. Other European capitalisms, after a late start, headed in the right direction, under the guidance of a bourgeoisie with an appropriately rational state at its disposal...
[p.1-2]
In contrast to this then-fashionable treatment of the English and French adaptations of capitalism, she suggests that the model of authentic capitalism exists nowhere.
↑ For a précis of the 1832 Reform Act, see Marjie Bloy, Ph. D., "Terms of the 1832 Reform Act," Victorian Web. Dr. Bloy has also written "The Anti-Slavery Campaign in Britain" & "The Corn Laws."
↑ Lewis Samuel Feuer, [Imperialism and the Anti-Imperialist Mind] Transaction Publishers (1989), in his chapter on "Understanding Progressive Imperialism," equated bourgeois sensibilities with the rationalist precepts of the Enlightenment. Towards the end of the 19th century, I think it is fair to say the bourgeois everywhere was atavistically hypernationalist and racist. A person can be racist and a do-gooder, something Feuer seems to have a hard time accepting.
↑ Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Belknap Press (1977); see esp. "The Revolution in Transportation and Communiation," p.79. For a comparison of Usonian with British and German business enterprise, see Chandler's Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism Belknap Press (2004)
↑ See Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870-1920, University Of Chicago Press (1992). The book is entirely devoted to this topic.
↑ Most comprehensive accounts of the NSDAP, Fascist, and Kodo rise to power in Germany, Italy, and Japan (respectively) make mention of financial backing of industry for the fascists. In Germany, there were many groups that were known to have supported the Nazis in their capital-intensive rise to power; the Freundeskreis der Wirtshaft ("Circle of Friends of the Economy") was a group of industrialists who financed research on racial policy, and probably allowed the donors to feel they were involved in the formulation of policy; in other words, membership in it was a reward to especially generous industrial donors, such as Baron Kurt von Schröder and Wilhelm Keppler (William Raymond Manchester, The Arms of Krupp, Back Bay, 1968, p.392). Another important contributor was Carl Duisberg of I.G. Farben and Fritz Thyssen (Ibid, p.359).
↑ Another excellent source is the indispensible Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business Anchor Foundation (1969). That book covers Italy and Fascism also.
↑ My sources on Militarist Japan are spottier; Western historians as of this writing tend to be skeptical that authentic fascism ever existed in Militarist Japan (e.g., Peter Duus and Daniel I. Okimoto, "Fascism and the History of Pre-War Japan: The Failure of a Concept," Journal of Asian Studies, vol. XXXIX, no. 1 (Nov 1979), p.65). In Japan, there was no convincing mass movement that preceded totalitarianism, and hence no clearly identifiable recipient of parvenu assistance. Nevertheless, Japan was rife with military societies that were copiously financed by Japanese industrialists seeking to liquidate Communism and trade unions. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) and the Occupational Authorities regarded the totalitarian regime in Japan as in any event strongly abetted by the bourgeoisie.
↑ For example, in 1933 Gen. Smedley Butler was allegedly sounded out by a group of the USA's leading industrial bourgeois, including Irenee DuPont, Grayson Murphy, and John J.Raskob, on the prospects of a coup against President Roosevelt. Butler notified the McCormack-Dickstein Committee in 1934. Nearly all evidence of this alleged coup consists of the McCormack-Dickstein Committee's report to Congress.
↑ Wikipedia: Hjalmar Schacht; see also the Jewish Virtual Library entry.