The Bourgeoisie was a social class that emerged in Europe during the mid-17th century to the advent of the industrial age. It was a social class between the impoverished peasantry and pompous royalty that gained a foothold in a European civilization that was going through rapid socio-economic transformation.
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Humble Beginnings.
The term ‘bourgeoisie’ stems from an old French term ‘burgeis’ which was meant to describe the inhabitants of a town. The bourgeoisie emerged from the peasantry and serfdom characteristic of the Middle Ages in Europe, a class of people entirely subject to the nobility and royalty of the ruling class.
The modernization of Europe and the subsequent settlement into cities has opened up other avenues for generating income and building livelihoods which motivated many, particularly those in the lower classes, to move and settle there. Before 1600, a town or city of more than 100,000 people was large and considered an outlier. However, by 1750 a sizeable number of cities with a population of 100,000 or more existed scattered across Europe.
The emergence of the bourgeoisie also coincided with the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment in Europe. The acquisition of knowledge and literacy, a reserve of royalty for centuries, proliferated into the masses fueled by innovations and inventions such as the printing press. Such ease of access to information was coupled with a hunger for knowledge, particularly in the lower reserves of society. Consequently, there was a level of emancipation within the bourgeoisie driven by a willingness to improve their social-economic status to the level of their social superiors; the royalty.
Much of the aforementioned growth in size and population numbers in the cities of Europe was fueled by the presence of administrative amenities of the government and the church. The presence of these amenities helped guarantee stability, especially in the ravaging war periods that were being witnessed in Europe at the time. Cities thrived and became centers of commerce, trade, industry, education, and artistry as their stability attracted people to move and settle there. Manufacturing and industry would later continue to thrive during the Industrial Age. A sense of freedom was imminent for many in the cities and was present in the Renaissance art form.
The productivity and prosperity witnessed in the cities was different from what was in the backward lifestyle of the rural peasantry. Affluence and opulence were now accessible to normal citizens who had relocated and found decent work in cities. The living standards between those living in the cities and the peasantry that worked in rural areas differed vastly, especially because the city dwellers had a lot more freedom of choice on what they could engage in.
The Bourgeoisie and The Industrial Revolution.
However, even as the city dwellers continued to thrive, a small crop of wealthy individuals from within this class emerged. These were members of the citizenry who had built massive fortunes by gaining profits by participating in the newly established avenues of economic participation. Whereas wealth was initially a reserve of the nobility, it was now quite apparent anyone could become wealthy if they figured out the right avenues. For example, getting into the right profession such as law or administration brought you closer to becoming part of the wealthier class.
Many people who moved to cities did not have the requisite education or skill required to be part of such professions and therefore, many ended up jobless. By the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the term bourgeoisie had evolved to describe the wealthy elites that had managed to gain control over economic production. As for the poorer set of workers living in cities, Karl Marx would later coin a term describe them, they were known as the proletariat.
In many ways, the bourgeoisie had become the very thing that it set out to destroy. The initial wave of enlightenment in Europe was fueled in some way by a deep-rooted resentment towards the monarchy and everything it stood for. The posh lifestyle. The lavish castles. And more importantly, its exploitation of the people it ruled over. The bourgeoisie represented a caliber of people who had managed to free themselves from living under oppressive monarchies and had built themselves to control production. All in all, the emergence of this class was crucial to the emergence of capitalism.
The Place of the Bourgeoisie in Modern Society.
Two centuries later, the world is still living in the radical socio-economic change that led to the emergence of the bourgeoisie. Much has changed since then but it may be argued that the foundational elements that were responsible for the emergence of the bourgeoisie are still present in modern society. That said, does the bourgeoisie still exist today?
Yes and No. The decline of the monarchy and the emergence of the modern republic have transformed the socio-political organization of society. For centuries, the monarchy was the highest class of society and the bourgeoisie emerged in its backdrop. Now that the monarchy has become a vestige of societal order, the place of the bourgeoisie has become undefined. Does it remain as the middle class responsible for handling the productive output of society without exercising absolute control or does it move to become the ruling class just because it is responsible for handling the productive output of society?
When faced with this quandary during the Industrial Revolution, the bourgeoisie chose the latter. The bourgeoisie remains the middle class of society by definition but it is quite the ruling class by its actions.
The bourgeoisie maintained an ambiguous ‘love-hate’ relationship with the aristocracy. Its emergence marked an evolution away from controlling systems of feudalism to a stratum between the nobility and the peasantry. With time, however, it had moved into becoming part of the aristocracy, particularly in 19th-century Britain and the Netherlands. Many of the bourgeoisie denounced their independent political and economic opinions and resorted to taking up ideals shared by the aristocracy. This transformation was described by Thomas Mann in Buddenbrooks; An entrepreneur evolves into an economic consolidator and then a patron of the arts before eventually becoming ideologically decadent, hedonistic, and self-indulgent.
The situation is no different today. The super-rich are the new aristocracy in a world where the lines between economic influence and political control are incredibly blurred. Consequently, many governments are controlled by a small clique of rich individuals who use their control over economic production to exercise political power. A bourgeoisie state, or in more scholarly terms, an oligarchy emerges in such a situation. Simply put, the bourgeoisie is the new monarchy.
The term bourgeoisie retains negative connotations as it is viewed as a way of describing the ‘exploitatively privileged’. Members of the bourgeoisie are convinced that they got rich through their enterprise, effort, and hard work. They are the brainchild of capitalism and everything good about it. Therefore, even the super-rich magnates of industry would define themselves as being part of the bourgeoisie seeing as they lacked aristocratic privileges and they only got where they are by ‘putting in the work’.
However, the socialist revolution that emerged in the 19th century fueled by the likes of Karl Marx managed to paint the term in a negative light. Marx argued that the bourgeoisie was no different from the exploitative social classes such as the monarchy that came before it. The bourgeoisie only achieved economic well-being by taking advantage of the proletariats working under them by underpaying them in comparison to their productive output. The socialists called for a fair gain; fair stature system that rewarded everyone based on their weighty contribution to economic output.
Since the bourgeoisie benefitted from the capitalist system, it was no different from the feudal or aristocratic systems before it by gaining control over productive output, it became the new oppressive tool of society. And no one wants to identify as being part of an ‘oppressive system’.
The modern economic enterprise has transformed the system of economic production. In their 1932 publication, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Mears describe the modern business enterprise as built on a separation between ownership and control. The owner/founder is involved in managing the business, and they need not own the resources required to run it. That is handled by a web of dispersed investors who pool their resources into the enterprise in exchange for gaining a level of control in the decision-making in the business. All in all, a system of investment and shareholding.
Much as Karl Marx had predicted, this further separated the bourgeoisie into even more classes; a small minority of the rich who could use their vast accumulation of resources to invest and have control over other enterprises without being directly involved. The vast majority are independent producers and artisans whose enterprises will eventually be run over by the resource-rich enterprises controlled by the super-rich. This is the trend that has fueled the emergence of mega-corporations run by powerful billionaires who seemingly have a stake and control over every other business.
In a Nutshell.
You’ve probably heard of the phrase that ‘the middle class is disappearing’. Economic gains benefit those at the top of the social pyramid most as they control production. Now that the bourgeoisie, which was initially representative of the middle class has moved to being the ruling class, a niche emerged to fill in the gap in the middle stratum of society they have left behind. That is where the so-called new middle class comes in. This new class of individuals have acquired trained skills to manage and sustain corporate jobs that enable them to live satisfactory lives, compared to the typical proletariat worker doing hands-on labor for lower income.
However, even the gap between these and the rich is huge and is only getting bigger. Furthermore, their place too is difficult to define as the term ‘satisfactory’ is subjective and a middle-income worker can be viewed as being incredibly rich or poor depending on the region of the world they are located.
Ladies and Gentlemen, there you have it; a story of how the lowly bourgeoisie rose to the top of the societal ladder. So, next time you hear this term being used somewhere, you are aware of what it is meant to represent vis-à-vis what it actually means.
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