Читать книгу The Bourgeois - Franco Moretti - Страница 6
ОглавлениеIntroduction: Concepts and Contradictions
1. ‘I AM A MEMBER OF THE BOURGEOIS CLASS’
The bourgeois . . . Not so long ago, this notion seemed indispensable to social analysis; these days, one might go years without hearing it mentioned. Capitalism is more powerful than ever, but its human embodiment seems to have vanished. ‘I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals’, wrote Max Weber, in 1895.1 Who could repeat these words today? Bourgeois ‘opinions and ideals’—what are they?
The changed atmosphere is reflected in scholarly work. Simmel and Weber, Sombart and Schumpeter, all saw capitalism and the bourgeois—economy and anthropology—as two sides of the same coin. ‘I know of no serious historical interpretation of this modern world of ours’, wrote Immanuel Wallerstein a quarter-century ago, ‘in which the concept of the bourgeoisie . . . is absent. And for good reason. It is hard to tell a story without its main protagonist.’2 And yet, today, even those historians who most emphasize the role of ‘opinions and ideals’ in the take-off of capitalism—Meiksins Wood, de Vries, Appleby, Mokyr—have little or no interest in the figure of the bourgeois. ‘In England there was capitalism’, writes Meiksins Wood in The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, ‘but it was not called into being by the bourgeoisie. In France there was a (more or less) triumphant bourgeoisie, but its revolutionary project had little to do with capitalism.’ Or, finally: ‘there is no necessary identification of bourgeois . . . with capitalist’.3
True, there is no necessary identification; but then, that is hardly the point. ‘The origin of the bourgeois class and of its peculiarities’, wrote Weber in The Protestant Ethic, is a process ‘closely connected with that of the origin of the capitalistic organization of labour, though not quite the same thing.’4 Closely connected, though not quite the same; this is the idea behind The Bourgeois: looking at the bourgeois and at his culture—for most of history, the bourgeois has definitely been a ‘he’—as parts of a power structure with which they don’t, however, simply coincide. But speaking of ‘the’ bourgeois, in the singular, is itself questionable. ‘The big bourgeoisie could not formally separate itself from its inferiors’, writes Hobsbawm in The Age of Empire: ‘its structure had to be kept open to new entrants—that was the nature of its being’.5 This permeability, adds Perry Anderson, sets the bourgeoisie apart
from the nobility before it and the working class after it. For all the important differences within each of these contrasting classes, their homogeneity is structurally greater: the aristocracy was typically defined by a legal status combining civil titles and juridical privileges, while the working class is massively demarcated by the condition of manual labour. The bourgeoisie possesses no comparable internal unity as a social group.6
Porous borders, and weak internal cohesion: do these traits invalidate the very idea of the bourgeoisie as a class? For its greatest living historian, Jürgen Kocka, this is not necessarily so, provided we distinguish between what we could call the core of this concept and its external periphery. The latter has indeed been extremely variable, socially as well as historically; up to the late eighteenth century, it consisted mostly of ‘the self-employed small businesspeople (artisans, retail merchants, innkeepers, and small proprietors)’ of early urban Europe; a hundred years later, of a completely different population made of ‘middle- and lower-ranking white collar employees and civil servants’.7 But in the meantime, in the course of the nineteenth century, the syncretic figure of the ‘propertied and educated bourgeoisie’ had emerged across western Europe, providing a centre of gravity for the class as a whole, and strengthening its features as a possible new ruling class: a convergence that found expression in the German conceptual pair of Besitzs- and Bildungsbürgertum—bourgeoisie of property, and bourgeoisie of culture—or, more prosaically, in the British tax system placing profits (from capital) and fees (from professional services) impartially ‘under the same heading’.8
The encounter of property and culture: Kocka’s ideal-type will be mine, too, but with one significant difference. As a literary historian, I will focus less on the actual relationships between specific social groups—bankers and high civil servants, industrialists and doctors, and so on—than on the ‘fit’ between cultural forms and the new class realities: how a word like ‘comfort’ outlines the contours of legitimate bourgeois consumption, for instance; or how the tempo of story-telling adjusts itself to the new regularity of existence. The bourgeois, refracted through the prism of literature: such is the subject of The Bourgeois.
Bourgeois culture. One culture? ‘Multicolored— bunt— . . . may serve for the class I have had under my microscope’, writes Peter Gay in bringing to a close his five volumes on The Bourgeois Experience.9 ‘Economic self-interest, religious agendas, intellectual convictions, social competition, the proper place of women became political issues where bourgeois battled bourgeois’, he adds in a later retrospective; divisions so acute ‘that it is tempting to doubt that the bourgeoisie was a definable entity at all’.10 For Gay, all these ‘striking variations’11 are the result of the nineteenth-century acceleration of social change, and are thus typical of the Victorian phase of bourgeois history.12 But a much longer perspective is also possible on the antinomies of bourgeois culture. In an essay on the Sassetti chapel in Santa Trinita, which takes its cue from Machiavelli’s portrait of Lorenzo in the Istorie Fiorentine—‘if you compared his light and his grave side [la vita leggera e la grave], two distinct personalities could be identified within him, seemingly impossible to reconcile [quasi con impossibile congiunzione congiunte]’—Aby Warburg observed that
the citizen of Medicean Florence united the wholly dissimilar characters of the idealist—whether medievally Christian, or romantically chivalrous, or classically neoplatonic—and the worldly, practical, pagan Etruscan merchant. Elemental yet harmonious in his vitality, this enigmatic creature joyfully accepted every psychic impulse as an extension of his mental range, to be developed and exploited at leisure.13
An enigmatic creature, idealistic and worldly. Writing of another bourgeois golden age, halfway between the Medici and the Victorians, Simon Schama muses on the ‘peculiar coexistence’ that allowed
lay and clerical governors to live with what otherwise would have been an intolerably contradictory value system, a perennial combat between acquisitiveness and asceticism . . . The incorrigible habits of material self-indulgence, and the spur of risky venture that were ingrained into the Dutch commercial economy themselves prompted all those warning clucks and solemn judgments from the appointed guardians of the old orthodoxy . . . The peculiar coexistence of apparently opposite value systems . . . gave them room to maneuver between the sacred and profane as wants or conscience commanded, without risking a brutal choice between poverty or perdition.14
Material self-indulgence, and the old orthodoxy: Jan Steen’s ‘Burgher of Delft’, who looks at us from the cover of Schama’s book (Figure 1): a heavy man, seated, in black, with his daughter’s silver-and-gold finery on one side, and a beggar’s discoloured clothes on the other. From Florence to Amsterdam, the frank vitality of those visages in Santa Trinita has been dimmed; the burgher is cheerlessly pinned to his chair, as if dispirited by the ‘moral pulling and pushing’ (Schama again) of his predicament: spatially close to his daughter, yet not looking at her; turned in the general direction of the woman, without actually addressing her; eyes downcast, unfocused. What is to be done?
Machiavelli’s ‘impossible conjunction’, Warburg’s ‘enigmatic creature’, Schama’s ‘perennial combat’: compared to these earlier contradictions of bourgeois culture, the Victorian age appears for what it really was: a time of compromise, much more than contrast. Compromise is not uniformity, of course, and one may still see the Victorians as somewhat ‘multicoloured’; but the colours are leftovers from the past, and are losing their brilliancy. Grey, not bunt, is the flag that flies over the bourgeois century.
‘I find it hard to understand why the bourgeois dislikes to be called by his name’, writes Groethuysen in his great study, Origines de l’esprit bourgeois en France: ‘kings have been called kings, priests priests, and knights knights; but the bourgeois likes to keep his incognito’.15 Garder l’incognito; and one thinks, inevitably, of that ubiquitous and elusive label: ‘middle class’. Every concept ‘establishes a particular horizon for potential experience and conceivable theory’, writes Reinhart Koselleck,16 and by choosing ‘middle class’ over ‘bourgeois’ the English language has certainly created a very distinctive horizon for social perception. But why? The bourgeois came into being somewhere ‘in the middle’, yes—he ‘was not a peasant or serf, but he was also not a noble’, as Wallerstein puts it17—but that middlingness was precisely what he wished to overcome: born in ‘the middle state’ of early modern England, Robinson Crusoe rejects his father’s idea that it is ‘the best state in the world’, and devotes his entire life to going beyond it. Why then settle on a designation that returns this class to its indifferent beginnings, rather than acknowledge its successes? What was at stake, in the choice of ‘middle class’ over ‘bourgeois’?
Figure 1
‘Bourgeois’ first appeared in eleventh-century French, as burgeis, to indicate those residents of medieval towns (bourgs) who enjoyed the legal right of being ‘free and exempt from feudal jurisdiction’ (Robert). The juridical sense of the term—from which arose the typically bourgeois idea of liberty as ‘freedom from’—was then joined, near the end of the seventeenth century, by an economic meaning that referred, with the familiar string of negations, to ‘someone who belonged neither to the clergy nor to the nobility, did not work with his hands, and possessed independent means’ (Robert again). From that moment on, though chronology and semantics vary from country to country,18 the word surfaces in all western European languages, from the Italian borghese to the Spanish burgués, Portuguese burguês, German Bürger and Dutch burger. In this group, the English ‘bourgeois’ stands out as the only case in which, instead of being assimilated by the morphology of the national language, the term has remained an unmistakable import from the French. And, indeed, ‘a (French) citizen or freeman’ is the OED’s first definition of ‘bourgeois’ as a noun; ‘of, or pertaining to the French middle class’ is that of the adjective, promptly buttressed by a series of quotations referring to France, Italy and Germany. The female noun ‘bourgeoise’ is ‘a Frenchwoman of the middle class’, while ‘bourgeoisie’—the first three entries mentioning France, continental Europe and Germany—is, consistently with the rest, ‘the body of freemen of a French town; the French middle class; also extended to that of other countries’.
‘Bourgeois’, marked as un-English. In Dinah Craik’s best-seller John Halifax, Gentleman (1856)—the fictional biography of a textile industrialist—the word appears only three times, always italicized as a sign of foreignness, and only used to belittle the idea (‘I mean the lower orders, the bourgeoisie’), or express contempt (‘What! A bourgeois—a tradesman?’). As for the other novelists of Craik’s time, perfect silence; in the Chadwyck-Healey database—whose 250 novels add up to a somewhat expanded version of the nineteenth-century canon—‘bourgeois’ occurs exactly once between 1850 and 1860, whereas ‘rich’ occurs 4,600 times, ‘wealthy’ 613, and ‘prosperous’ 449. And if we broaden the investigation to the entire century—addressing it from the slightly different angle of the term’s range of application, rather than its frequency—the 3,500 novels of the Stanford Literary Lab give the following results: the adjective ‘rich’ is applied to 1,060 different nouns; ‘wealthy’, to 215; ‘prosperous’, to 156; and ‘bourgeois’, to 8: family, doctor, virtues, air, virtue, affectation, playhouse, and, bizarrely, escutcheon.
Why this reluctance? In general, writes Kocka, bourgeois groups
set themselves off from the old authorities, the privileged hereditary nobility, and absolute monarchy . . . From this line of thought the converse follows: To the extent that these frontlines were missing or faded, talk of a Bürgertum that is at once comprehensive and delimited loses its substance in reality. This explains international differences: where the tradition of nobility was weak or absent (as in Switzerland and the United States), where a country’s early de-feudalization and commercialization of agriculture gradually wore down the noble–bourgeois distinction and even urban–rural differences (as in England and Sweden), we find powerful factors counteracting the formation of a distinctive Bürgertum and discourse on Bürgertum.19
The lack of a clear ‘frontline’ for the discourse on Bürgertum: this is what made the English language so indifferent to the word ‘bourgeois’. Conversely, pressure was building behind ‘middle class’ for the simple reason that many observers of early industrial Britain wanted a class in the middle. Manufacturing districts, wrote James Mill in the Essay on Government (1824), were ‘peculiarly unhappy from a very great deficiency of middle rank, as there the population almost wholly consists of rich manufacturers and poor workmen’.20 Rich and poor: ‘there is no town in the world’, observed Canon Parkinson in his famous description of Manchester, echoed by many of his contemporaries, ‘where the distance between the rich and the poor is so great, or the barrier between them so difficult to be crossed’.21 As industrial growth was polarizing English society—‘the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers’, as the Communist Manifesto would starkly put it—the need for mediation became more acute, and a class in the middle seemed the only one that could ‘sympathize’ with the ‘afflictions of poor workmen’ (Mill again), while also ‘guiding’ them ‘by their advice’, and providing ‘a good example to admire’.22 They were ‘the link which connects the upper and the lower orders’, added Lord Brougham, who also described them—in a speech on the Reform Bill entitled ‘Intelligence of the Middle Classes’—as ‘the genuine depositaries of sober, rational, intelligent, and honest English feeling’.23
If the economy created the broad historical need for a class in the middle, politics added the decisive tactical twist. In the Google Books corpus, ‘middle class’, ‘middle classes’ and ‘bourgeois’ appear to have been more or less equally frequent between 1800 and 1825; but in the years immediately preceding the 1832 Reform Bill—when the relationship between social structure and political representation moves to the centre of public life—‘middle class’ and ‘middle classes’ become suddenly two or three times more frequent than ‘bourgeois’. Possibly, because ‘middle class’ was a way to dismiss the bourgeoisie as an independent group, and instead look at it from above, entrusting it with a task of political containment.24 Then, once the baptism had occurred, and the new term had solidified, all sorts of consequences (and reversals) followed: though ‘middle class’ and ‘bourgeois’ indicated exactly the same social reality, for instance, they created around it very different associations: once placed ‘in the middle’, the bourgeoisie could appear as a group that was itself partly subaltern, and couldn’t really be held responsible for the way of the world. And then, ‘low’, ‘middle’ and ‘upper’ formed a continuum where mobility was much easier to imagine than among incommensurable categories—‘classes’—like peasantry, proletariat, bourgeoisie, or nobility. And so, in the long run, the symbolic horizon created by ‘middle class’ worked extremely well for the English (and American) bourgeoisie: the initial defeat of 1832, which had made an ‘independent bourgeois representation’25 impossible, later shielded it from direct criticism, promoting a euphemistic version of social hierarchy. Groethuysen was right: incognito worked.
4. BETWEEN HISTORY AND LITERATURE
The bourgeois between history and literature. But in this book I limit myself to only a handful of the possible examples. I begin with the bourgeois before his prise de pouvoir (‘A Working Master’): a dialogue between Defoe and Weber around a man alone on an island, dis-embedded from the rest of mankind; but a man who is beginning to see a pattern in his existence, and to find the right words to express it. In ‘Serious Century’, the island has become a half continent: the bourgeois has multiplied across western Europe, and extended his influence in many directions; it’s the most ‘aesthetic’ moment of this history: narrative inventions, stylistic consistency, masterpieces—a great bourgeois literature, if ever there was one. ‘Fog’, on Victorian Britain, tells a different story: after decades of extraordinary successes, the bourgeois can no longer be simply ‘himself’; his power over the rest of society—his ‘hegemony’—is now on the agenda; and at this very moment, the bourgeois feels suddenly ashamed of himself; he has gained power, but lost his clarity of vision—his ‘style’. It’s the turning point of the book, and its moment of truth: the bourgeois reveals himself to be much better at exercising power within the economic sphere than at establishing a political presence and formulating a general culture. Afterwards, the sun begins to set on the bourgeois century: in the southern and eastern regions of ‘National Malformations’, one great figure after the other is crushed and ridiculed by the persistence of the old regime; while in the same years, from the tragic no man’s land (more than ‘Norway’, certainly) of Ibsen’s cycle comes the final, radical self-critique of bourgeois existence (‘Ibsen and the spirit of capitalism’).
For now, let this synopsis suffice; and let me only add a few words on the relationship between the study of literature and that of history tout court. What kind of history—what kind of evidence is that offered by literary works? Clearly, never a direct one: the mill-owner Thornton in North and South (1855), or the entrepreneur Wokulski in The Doll (1890), proves exactly nothing about the Manchester or Warsaw bourgeoisie. They belong to a parallel historical series—a sort of cultural double helix, where the spasms of capitalist modernization are matched and reshaped by literary form-giving. ‘Every form is the resolution of a fundamental dissonance of existence’, wrote the young Lukács of Theory of the Novel;26 and if this is so, then literature is that strange universe where the resolutions are all perfectly preserved—they are, quite simply, the texts we still read—while the dissonances have quietly vanished from sight: the more thoroughly, the more successful their resolution turned out to be.
There is something ghostly, in this history where questions disappear, and answers survive. But if we accept the idea of literary form as the fossil remains of what had once been a living and problematic present; and if we work our way backwards, ‘reverse-engineering’ it to understand the problem it was designed to solve; if we do this, then formal analysis may unlock—in principle, if not always in practice—a dimension of the past that would otherwise remain hidden. Here lies its possible contribution to historical knowledge: by understanding the opacity of Ibsen’s hints to the past, or the oblique semantics of Victorian adjectives, or even (at first sight, not a cheerful task) the role of the gerund in Robinson Crusoe, we enter a realm of shadows, where the past recovers its voice, and still speaks to us.27
But speaks to us, only through the medium of form. Stories, and styles: that’s where I found the bourgeois. Styles, especially; which came as quite a surprise, considering how often narratives are viewed as the foundations of social identity,28 and how frequently the bourgeoisie has been identified with turbulence and change—from some famous scenes of the Phenomenology, to the Manifesto’s ‘all that is solid melts into air’, and Schumpeter’s creative destruction. So, I expected bourgeois literature to be defined by new and unpredictable plots: ‘leaps into the dark’, as Elster writes of capitalist innovations.29 And instead, as I argue in ‘Serious Century’, the opposite seems to have been the case: regularity, not disequilibrium, was the great narrative invention of bourgeois Europe.30 All that was solid, became more so.
Why? The main reason lies probably in the bourgeois himself. In the course of the nineteenth century, once the stigma against ‘new wealth’ had been overcome, a few recurrent traits clustered around this figure: energy, first of all; self-restraint; intellectual clarity; commercial honesty; a strong sense of goals. All ‘good’ traits; but not good enough to match the type of narrative hero—warrior, knight, conqueror, adventurer—on whom Western story-telling had relied for, literally, millennia. ‘The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail’, wrote Schumpeter, mockingly; and business life—‘in the office, among columns of figures’—is doomed to be ‘essentially unheroic’.31 It’s a major discontinuity between the old and the new ruling class: whereas the aristocracy had shamelessly idealized itself in a whole gallery of intrepid knights, the bourgeoisie produced no such myth of itself. The great mechanism of adventure was being eroded by bourgeois civilization—and without adventure, characters lost the stamp of uniqueness that comes from the encounter with the unknown.32 Compared to a knight, a bourgeois appears un-marked and elusive; similar to any other bourgeois. Here is a scene from the beginning of North and South, where the heroine describes a Manchester industrialist to her mother:
‘Oh! I hardly know what he is like’, said Margaret . . . ‘About thirty, with a face that is neither exactly plain, nor yet handsome, nothing remarkable—not quite a gentleman; but that was hardly to be expected.’
‘Not vulgar, or common, though’, put in her father . . .33
Hardly, about, neither exactly, nor yet, nothing, not quite . . . Margaret’s judgment, usually quite sharp, loses itself in a spiral of evasions. It’s the abstraction of the bourgeois type: in his extreme form, mere ‘capital personified’, or even just ‘a machine for the transformation of surplus-value into surplus capital’, to quote a couple of passages from Capital.34 In Marx, as later in Weber, the methodical suppression of all sensuous traits makes it hard to imagine how this character could ever be the centre of an interesting story—unless of course self-repression is the story, as in Mann’s portrait of consul Thomas Buddenbrook (which made a profound impression on Weber himself).35 Things are different in an earlier period, or at the margins of capitalist Europe, where the weakness of capitalism as a system leaves much greater freedom to imagine powerful individual figures like Robinson Crusoe, Gesualdo Motta, or Stanislaw Wokulski. But where capitalistic structures solidify, narrative and stylistic mechanisms replace individuals as the centre of the text. It’s another way to look at the structure of this book: two chapters on bourgeois characters—and two on bourgeois language.
6. PROSE AND KEYWORDS: PRELIMINARY REMARKS
I found the bourgeois in styles more than stories, I said a few pages ago, and by ‘styles’ I meant mostly two things: prose, and keywords. The rhetoric of prose will come into view gradually, one aspect at a time (continuity, precision, productivity, neutrality . . .), in the first two chapters of the book, where I chart its ascending arc through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has been a great achievement, bourgeois prose—and a very laborious one. The absence from its universe of any concept of ‘inspiration’—this gift from the gods, where idea and results merge magically in a single instant of creation—suggests how impossible it is to imagine the medium of prose without immediately thinking of work. Linguistic work, to be sure, but of such a kind that it embodies some of the most typical features of bourgeois activity. If The Bourgeois has a protagonist, this laborious prose is certainly it.
The prose I have just outlined is an ideal-type, never fully realized in any specific text. Keywords, no; they are actual words, used by real writers, and perfectly traceable to this or that book. Here, the conceptual frame has been set decades ago by Raymond Williams, in Culture & Society and Keywords, and by Reinhart Koselleck’s work on Begriffgeschichte. For Koselleck, who focuses on the political language of modern Europe, ‘a concept is not simply indicative of the relations which it covers; it is also a factor within them’;36 more precisely, it is a factor that institutes a ‘tension’ between language and reality, and is often ‘consciously deployed as a weapon’.37 Though a great model for intellectual history, this approach is probably unsuited to a social being who, as Groethuysen puts it, ‘acts, but doesn’t speak much’;38 and when he speaks, prefers casual and everyday terms to the intellectual clarity of concepts. ‘Weapon’ is thus certainly the wrong term for pragmatic and constructive keywords such as ‘useful’, ‘efficiency’, ‘serious’—not to mention great mediators like ‘comfort’ or ‘influence’, much closer to Benveniste’s idea of language as ‘the instrument by which the world and society are adjusted ’39 than to Koselleck’s ‘tension’. It is hardly an accident, I think, that so many of my keywords have turned out to be adjectives: less central than nouns (let alone concepts) to a culture’s semantic system, adjectives are unsystematic and indeed ‘adjustable’; or, as Humpty Dumpty would scornfully say, ‘adjectives, you can do anything with’.40
Prose, and keywords: two parallel threads that will resurface throughout the argument, at the different scales of paragraphs, sentences, and individual words. Through them, the peculiarities of bourgeois culture will emerge from the implicit, and even buried dimension of language: a ‘mentality’ made of unconscious grammatical patterns and semantic associations, more than clear and distinct ideas. This was not the original plan of the book, and there are moments when I’m still taken aback by the fact that the pages on Victorian adjectives may be the conceptual centre of The Bourgeois. But if the ideas of the bourgeois have received plenty of attention, his mentality—aside from a few isolated attempts, like Groethuysen’s study almost a century ago—remains still largely unexplored; and then, the minutiae of language reveal secrets that great ideas often mask: the friction between new aspirations and old habits, the false starts, the hesitations, the compromises; in one word, the slowness of cultural history. For a book that sees bourgeois culture as an incomplete project, it felt like the right methodological choice.
7. ‘THE BOURGEOIS IS LOST . . .’
On 14 April 1912, Benjamin Guggenheim, Solomon’s younger brother, found himself on board the Titanic, and, as the ship started sinking, he was one of those who helped women and children onto the lifeboats, withstanding the frenzy, and at times the brutality, of other male passengers. Then, when his steward was ordered to man one of the boats, Guggenheim took his leave, and asked him to tell his wife that ‘no woman was left on board because Ben Guggenheim was a coward’. And that was it.41 His words may have been a little less resonant, but it really doesn’t matter; he did the right, very difficult thing to do. And so, when a researcher for Cameron’s 1997 Titanic unearthed the anecdote, he immediately brought it to the scriptwriters’ attention: what a scene. But he was flatly turned down: too unrealistic. The rich don’t die for abstract principles like cowardice and the like. And indeed, the film’s vaguely Guggenheim-like figure tries to force his way onto a lifeboat with a gun.
‘The bourgeois is lost’, wrote Thomas Mann in his 1932 essay on ‘Goethe as a Representative of the Bourgeois Age’, and these two Titanic moments—placed at the opposite ends of the twentieth century—agree with him. Lost, not because capitalism is: to the contrary, capitalism is stronger than ever (if, Golem-like, mostly in destruction). What has evaporated is the sense of bourgeois legitimacy: the idea of a ruling class that doesn’t just rule, but deserves to do so. It was this conviction that animated Guggenheim’s words on the Titanic; at stake, was his class’s ‘prestige (and hence trust)’, to use one of Gramsci’s passages on the concept of hegemony.42 Giving it up, meant losing the right to rule.
Power, justified by values. But just as bourgeois political rule was finally on the agenda,43 three major novelties, emerging in quick succession, altered the picture forever. First came political collapse. As the belle époque came to its tawdry end, like the operette in which it liked to mirror itself, the bourgeoisie joined forces with the old elite in precipitating Europe into the carnage of war; afterwards, it shielded its class interests behind black and brown shirts, paving the way for worse massacres. As the old regime was ending, the new men proved incapable of acting like a true ruling class: when, in 1942, Schumpeter wrote with cold contempt that ‘the bourgeois class . . . needs a master’,44 he had no need to explain what he meant.
The second transformation, nearly opposite in nature, emerged after the Second World War, with the widespread establishment of democratic regimes. ‘The peculiarity of the historical consent won from the masses within modern capitalist social formations’, writes Perry Anderson, is
the belief by the masses that they exercise an ultimate self-determination within the existing social order . . . a credence in the democratic equality of all citizens in the government of the nation—in other words, disbelief in the existence of any ruling class.45
Having concealed itself behind rows of uniforms, the European bourgeoisie now absconded behind a political myth that demanded its self-effacement as a class; an act of camouflage made that much easier by the pervasive discourse of the ‘middle class’. And then, the final touch; as capitalism brought a relative well-being to the lives of large working masses in the West, commodities became the new principle of legitimation: consensus was built on things, not men—let alone principles. It was the dawn of today: capitalism triumphant, and bourgeois culture dead.
Many things are missing from this book. Some I had discussed elsewhere, and felt I had nothing new to say about: it’s the case of Balzac’s parvenus, or Dickens’s middle class, that had played a large role in The Way of the World and Atlas of the European Novel. Late-nineteenth-century American authors—Norris, Howells, Dreiser—seemed for their part to add little to the general picture; besides, The Bourgeois is a partisan essay, with no encyclopaedic ambitions. That said, there is one topic that I would have really liked to include, had it not threatened to become a book all by itself: a parallel between Victorian Britain and the post-1945 United States, highlighting the paradox of these two hegemonic capitalist cultures—the only ones that have existed so far—resting largely on anti-bourgeois values.46 I am thinking, of course, of the omnipresence of religious sentiment in public discourse; a presence that is in fact growing, in a sharp reversal of earlier trends towards secularization. Similarly for the great technological advances of the nineteenth and late twentieth century: instead of encouraging a rationalistic mentality, the industrial and then the digital ‘revolutions’ have produced a mix of scientific illiteracy and religious superstition—these, too, worse now than then—that defy belief. In this, the United States of today radicalizes the central thesis of the Victorian chapter: the defeat of Weberian Entzauberung at the core of the capitalist system, and its replacement by a sentimental re-enchantment of social relations. In both cases, a key ingredient has been the drastic infantilization of the national culture: from the pious idea of ‘family reading’ that launched the Bowdlerization of Victorian literature, to the syrupy replica—the family, smiling at its TV—that has put American entertainment to sleep.47 And the parallel can be extended in just about every direction, from the anti-intellectualism of ‘useful’ knowledge, and of much educational policy—beginning with its addiction to sports—to the ubiquity of words like ‘earnest’ (then) and ‘fun’ (now), with their thinly disguised contempt for intellectual and emotional seriousness.
The ‘American way of life’ as the Victorianism of today: tempting as the idea was, I was too aware of my ignorance of contemporary matters, and decided against it. It was the right decision—but difficult, because it meant admitting that The Bourgeois was an exclusively historical study, with no true link to the present. History professors, muses Dr Cornelius in ‘Disorder and Early Sorrow’, ‘do not love history because it is something that comes to pass, but only because it is something that has come to pass . . . their hearts belong to the coherent, disciplined, historic past . . . The past is immortalized; that is to say, it is dead.’48 Like Cornelius, I too am a history professor; but I like to think that disciplined lifelessness may not be all I will be capable of. In this sense, inscribing The Bourgeois to Perry Anderson and Paolo Flores d’Arcais signals more than my friendship and admiration towards them; it expresses the hope that, one day, I will learn from them to use the intelligence of the past for the critique of the present. This book does not live up to that hope. But the next one may.
1 ‘Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik’, in Gesammelte politische Schriften, Tübingen 1971, p. 20.
2 Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The Bourgeois(ie) as Concept and Reality’, New Left Review I/167 (January–February 1988), p. 98.
3 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States, London 1992, p. 3; the second passage is from The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, London 2002 (1999), p. 63.
4 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York 1958 (1905), p. 24 (emphasis added).
5 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914, New York 1989 (1987), p. 177.
6 Perry Anderson, ‘The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution’ (1976), in English Questions, London 1992, p. 122.
7 Jürgen Kocka, ‘Middle Class and Authoritarian State: Toward a History of the German Bürgertum in the Nineteenth Century’, in his Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society. Business, Labor, and Bureaucracy in Modern Germany, New York/Oxford 1999, p. 193.
8 Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, p. 172.
9 Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. V. Pleasure Wars, New York 1999 (1998), pp. 237–8.
10 Peter Gay, Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815–1914, New York 2002, p. 5.
11 Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. I. Education of the Senses, Oxford 1984, p. 26.
12 Ibid., pp. 45ff.
13 ‘The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie’ (1902), in Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, Los Angeles 1999, p. 190–1, 218. A similar conjunction of opposites emerges from Warburg’s pages on the donor portrait in ‘Flemish Art and the Florentine Early Renaissance’ (1902): ‘the hands maintain the self-forgetful gesture of appealing for heavenly protection; but the gaze is directed, whether in reverie or in watchfulness, into the earthly distance’ (p. 297).
14 Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, California 1988, pp. 338, 371.
15 Bernard Groethuysen, Origines de l’esprit bourgeois en France. I: L’Eglise et la Bourgeoisie, Paris 1927, p. vii.
16 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘ Begriffgeschichte and Social History’, in his Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, New York 2004 (1979), p. 86.
17 Wallerstein, ‘Bourgeois(ie) as Concept and Reality’, pp. 91–2. Behind Wallerstein’s double negation lies a more remote past, which was illuminated by Emile Benveniste in the chapter ‘An occupation without a name: commerce’ of the Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. Briefly put, Benveniste’s thesis is that trade—one of the earliest forms of ‘bourgeois’ activity—was ‘an occupation which, at least in the beginning, did not correspond to any of the hallowed, traditional activities’, and that, as a consequence, it could only be defined by negative terms like the Greek askholia and the Latin negotium (nec-otium, ‘the negation of otium’), or generic ones like the Greek pragma, the French affaires (‘no more than a substantivation of the expression à faire’), or the English adjective ‘busy’ (which ‘produced the abstract noun business’). See Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, Miami 1973 (1969), p. 118.
18 The trajectory of the German Bürger—‘from (Stadt-)Bürger (burgher) around 1700 via (Staats-)Bürger (citizen) around 1800 to Bürger (bourgeois) as a non-proletarian around 1900’—is particularly striking: see Koselleck, ‘ Begriffgeschichte and Social History’, p. 82.
19 Kocka, ‘Middle Class and Authoritarian State’, pp. 194–5.
20 James Mill, An Essay on Government, ed. Ernest Baker, Cambridge 1937 (1824), p. 73.
21 Richard Parkinson, On the Present Condition of the Labouring Poor in Manchester; with Hints for Improving It, London/Manchester 1841, p. 12.
22 Mill, Essay on Government, p. 73.
23 Henry Brougham, Opinions of Lord Brougham on Politics, Theology, Law, Science, Education, Literature, &c. &c.: As Exhibited in His Parliamentary and Legal Speeches, and Miscellaneous Writings, London 1837, pp. 314–15.
24 ‘The vital thing in the situation of 1830–2, so it seemed to Whig ministers, was to break the radical alliance by driving a wedge between the middle and the working classes’, writes F. M. L. Thompson (The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830–1900, Harvard 1988, p. 16). This wedge placed below the middle class was compounded by the promise of an alliance above it: ‘it is of the utmost importance’, declared Lord Grey, ‘to associate the middle with the higher orders of society’; while Drohr Wahrman—who has reconstructed the long debate on the middle class with exceptional lucidity—points out that Brougham’s famous encomium also emphasized ‘political responsibility . . . rather than intransigence; loyalty to the crown, rather than to the rights of the people; value as a bulwark against revolution, rather than against encroachments on liberty’ (Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840, Cambridge 1995, pp. 308–9).
25 Perry Anderson, ‘The Figures of Descent’ (1987), in his English Questions, London 1992, p. 145.
26 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, Cambridge, MA, 1974 (1914–15), p. 62.
27 Aesthetic forms as structured responses to social contradictions: given this relationship between literary and social history, I assumed that the essay ‘Serious Century’, though originally written for a literary collection, would fit quite smoothly into this book (after all, its working title had long been ‘On Bourgeois Seriousness’). But when I re-read the essay, I immediately felt (and I mean felt: irrationally, and irresistibly) that I had to cut much of the original, and reformulate the rest. The editing done, I realized that it mostly concerned three sections—all entitled ‘Parting of the Ways’ in the original version—that had outlined the wider morphospace within which the forms of bourgeois seriousness had taken shape. What I felt the need to eliminate, in other words, was the spectrum of formal variations that had been historically available; what survives is the result of the nineteenth-century selection process. In a book on bourgeois culture, this seems like a plausible choice; but it highlights the difference between literary history as history of literature—where the plurality, and even randomness, of formal options is a key aspect of the picture—and literary history as (part of the) history of society: where what matters is instead the connection between a specific form and its social function.
28 A recent instance, from a book on the French bourgeoisie: ‘I posit here that the existence of social groups, while rooted in the material world, is shaped by language, and more specifically by narrative: in order for a group to claim a role as an actor in society and polity, it must have a story or stories about itself.’ Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850, Cambridge, MA, 2003, p. 6.
29 Schumpeter ‘praised capitalism not because of its efficiency and rationality, but because of its dynamic character . . . Rather than gloss over the creative and unpredictable aspects of innovation, he made these into the cornerstone of his theory. Innovation is essentially a disequilibrium phenomenon—a leap into the dark.’ Jon Elster, Explaining Technical Change: A Case Study in the Philosophy of Science, Cambridge 1983, pp. 11, 112.
30 The same bourgeois resistance to narrative emerges from Richard Helgerson’s study of Dutch Golden Age realism: a visual culture where ‘women, children, servants, peasants, craftsmen and interloping male suitors act’, whereas ‘upper class male householders . . . are’, and tend to find their form of choice in the non-narrative genre of the portrait. See ‘Soldiers and Enigmatic Girls: The Politics of Dutch Domestic Realism, 1650–1672’, Representations 58 (1997), p. 55.
31 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York 1975 (1942), pp. 137, 128. In a similar vein, Weber evoked Carlyle’s definition of the age of Cromwell as ‘the last of our heroisms’ (Weber, Protestant Ethic, p. 37).
32 On the relationship between adventure-mentality and the capitalist spirit, see Michael Nerlich, The Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750, Minnesota 1987 (1977), and the first two sections of the next chapter.
33 Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, New York/London 2005 (1855), p. 60.
34 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, Harmondsworth 1990 (1867), pp. 739, 742.
35 On Mann and the bourgeoisie, besides Lukács’s numerous essays, see Alberto Asor Rosa’s ‘Thomas Mann o dell’ambiguità borghese’, Contropiano 2: 68 and 3: 68. If there is one specific moment when the idea of a book on the bourgeois first crossed my mind, it was over forty years ago, reading Asor’s essays; the book was then begun in earnest in 1999–2000, during a year at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.
36 Koselleck, ‘ Begriffgeschichte and Social History’, p. 86.
37 Ibid., p. 78.
38 Groethuysen, Origines I, p. xi.
39 Emile Benveniste, ‘Remarks on the Function of Language in Freudian Theory’, in Problems in General Linguistics, Oxford, OH, 1971 (1966), p. 71 (emphasis added).
40 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Harmondsworth 1998 (1872), p. 186.
41 John H. Davis, The Guggenheims, 1848–1988: An American Epic, New York 1988, p. 221.
42 Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Torino 1975, p. 1519.
43 Having been ‘the first class in history to achieve economic pre-eminence without aspiring to political rule’, writes Hannah Arendt, the bourgeoisie achieved its ‘political emancipation’ in the course of ‘the imperialist period (1886–1914)’. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York 1994 (1948), p. 123.
44 Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 138.
45 ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review I/100 (November–December 1976), p. 30.
46 In common use, the term ‘hegemony’ covers two domains that are historically and logically distinct: the hegemony of one capitalist state over other capitalist states, and that of one social class over other social classes; or in short, international and national hegemony. Britain and the United States have been the only cases of international hegemony so far; but of course there have been many cases of national bourgeois classes variously exercising their hegemony at home. My argument in this paragraph and in ‘Fog’ has to do with the specific values I associate to British and American national hegemony; how these values relate to those that foster international hegemony is a very interesting question, just not the one addressed here.
47 Tellingly, the most representative story-tellers of the two cultures—Dickens and Spielberg—have both specialized in stories that appeal to children as much as to adults.
48 Thomas Mann, Stories of Three Decades, New York 1936, p. 506.
