Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  A similar contrast differentiated the economy regulated by guild or mercantilist principles from the one for which Adam Smith argued. The first was organized so as to give special protection to the position of certain individuals or groups, such as guild masters or participants in chartered companies; the second justified itself by its ability to contribute to wealth in general, an end product whose sum depended on allowing the network to operate according to principles that arose inside it. A parallel line of division exists between a polity organized so that the ends to which its combined means are devoted are supposed to be determined by tradition or the independent will of some transcendent being or power, and one where the interactions members themselves develop provide the grounds and principles for giving direction to their common life. In his Persian Letters Montesquieu has one of his characters say that after long seeking to “decide which government was most in conformity with reason, I have come to think that the most perfect is one that attains its purpose with the least trouble.”12 Where such a political association sets ends for itself, they are likely to be ones that support its independence and its ability to develop principles it comes to recognize as its own. One might list the goals of such a polity as “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” that is to advance mutual interchange in a legally established framework, protect the association from external threats, and assure its continued ability to determine its own direction. To be sure ancient city-states and medieval communes posited similar ends for themselves, but seldom outside a transcendent order thought to contain them, and in whose service they were expected to operate.

  The passage from a form of life primarily characterized by ordained or teleocratic networks to one in which autonomous ones become increasingly prominent brought changes that it makes a certain sense to see in terms of gains and losses, however subjective and contested such judgments may be. The strength of ordained or teleocratic networks is that they infuse social interaction with a set of common values and (in theory at least) subordinate individual ambitions and desires to the fulfillment of what are commonly regarded as “higher” purposes. They impart lofty meaning to various spheres of life, and may restrict the resources invested in “base” ones. But they impede the release of productive energies that originate in unauthorized places or that cannot be harnessed to reinforce whatever system of already specified goals they are expected to serve. The strength of autonomous or self-constituting networks is that they give free rein to such activities as producing wealth, developing the organized life of a political community, or furthering the growth and elaboration of media of expression and communication that allow professions and other activities in the sphere of culture to flourish and evolve. But were they to exist in a pure form, such networks would offer no guidance either about the use to which wealth is to be put or about the modes in which it is produced, about the purposes to which political power is devoted, or the ends and consequences of intellectual, artistic, or scientific activity. The means themselves become ends: money, power, recognition. The litany of laments that arises out of such situations (which Max Weber described in terms of a shift from substantive to instrumental rationality) has long been painfully familiar to modern people: life becomes empty of worthwhile goals, individuals grow selfish, unable to recognize ends higher than their own personal interests, and feel alienated from the life around them. Marx praised the bourgeoisie as showing for the first time “what man’s activity can bring about.” But the other side of this release of human energy was highlighted by Dickens as the philosophy of Mr. Pancks in Little Dorrit: “Keep always at it, and I’ll keep you always at it, and you keep somebody else always at it. There you are with the Whole Duty of Man in a commercial country.”13

  In practice, of course, such transformations are never complete. Teleocratic networks did not wholly rule over pre-modern life, nor have purely autonomous ones acquired full dominion in modern times. There are reasons for being glad that this is the case, since pre-modern societies would have been deprived of significant quantities of vitality and creativity and remained largely stagnant had all their activities been directed toward preordained goals, while the ills of modern life would be deeper and less tractable were people unable to set other ends for their activities than the mere development of the means they employ to achieve them. (At the same time, this persistence of pre-modern values and orientations also needs to be recognized, as I will argue below, as one source of some of the rigidity and narrow-mindedness for which nineteenth-century life has often been taken to task.) Indeed it remains difficult in contemporary society, as it already was earlier, to distinguish means unfailingly from ends and to privilege one over the other, since, as Simmel noted in considerable detail, there is no means employed by human beings that cannot become an end in itself, and no end that cannot become a means to some other one. Money is the most striking example of a means that easily becomes an end for many people, but power is close behind, and the history of religion is shot through with moments of recognition that the faith that ought to be an end in itself has in fact served as a means for a wide range of self-interested aims, from achieving power over others in purely secular, sometimes highly suspect ways to gaining bliss or avoiding torment (as opposed to the purer religious goal of union between individuals and God).14 It remains true all the same that much of the history of bourgeois life and culture is a story of attempts to liberate means from ends that imposed external restrictions on them. I will argue below that pressures to eliminate such constraints increased from around the middle of the eighteenth century, generated in good part inside networks of means originally set up under teleocratic assumptions, but whose expansion and thickening offered those with access to them opportunities to use their resources in new ways, and that similar changes on a much larger scale gave a new quality to life after 1850. Bourgeois were prominent among those who seized or benefitted from such opportunities in both periods, but they were not alone.

  Networks, classes, individuals

  It would not be wrong to describe the overall goal of this book as to provide a new perspective on the history of the European bourgeoisie, but it is a perspective in which the bourgeoisie as a class is not the main character in the story. The history of bourgeois life is first of all the history of the evolving networks of means that provide its frames of action and development, as well as the basis of its special relationship to modernity, the kernel of its larger historical significance. This shift in perspective rests partly on the ideas sketched out so far in this Introduction, but partly too on some considerations about the role of social classes and especially of the bourgeois class in history. The topic is too large to receive adequate treatment here, but I need to say certain things about it. The first is that class remains a significant category in the discussions that follow. I have already emphasized that the power networks of means generate is social power, and that such power, however much it may benefit society as a whole, does not flow equally to everyone. Instead it often accrues chiefly to those who possess resources that facilitate access to it: money, property, connections, talents. In principle access to such social power is open and democratic in ways that the inherited or legally conveyed social position or privilege characteristic of Old Regime societies was not, but in practice it often perpetuates and even amplifies social differences.

  Both the process whereby class became an important category of social thinking and some of the difficulties it created will appear in the historical accounts that follow, but I need to say a preliminary word about both these matters here. The idea of class began to replace older notions such as “rank” or “order” from late in the eighteenth century; for this shift there were a number of reasons, but for now we can content ourselves with two. First, administrators and state officials sought to divide people into categories, chiefly in order to count, oversee, or act on them
in some way, reckoning up resources, trying to guide behavior, recruiting soldiers or collecting taxes. Second, politicians in search of support sought to build up a following by appealing to sections of the public on the basis of shared interests or situations, at once distinguishing those they sought to enlist from others and giving a broad reach to the category they claimed to represent. Both ways of constituting classes drew on concrete similarities between people, but both were also abstract and – willfully or not – ignored certain differences, so that those who relied on them sometimes miscalculated the effects of their actions or experienced frustration and disappointment at the results.

  Among these was Marx, even though his views about classes were more subtle and complex than some of his famous formulas may suggest. Even as he declared all history to be the history of class conflict he recognized that every large social category consisted of many sub-groups with diverse and competing orientations and interests, economic, geographic, occupational, and cultural; conflicts existed within as well as between classes. But he argued that these internal dissensions would be overcome as struggles with people in other classes pushed workers or bourgeois to join together in order to act effectively against their enemies. Class conflict turned otherwise divided and fragmented classes into unified agents able to pursue common goals and participate in the drama of history’s unfolding. When revolution came in 1848, however, Marx was disappointed to find that this expected fusion did not take place, at least not for the bourgeoisie, which grew increasingly fragmented as its various sections proved unable to resolve their differences; it was this failure to unite that allowed the upstart Louis Bonaparte to triumph over his bourgeois enemies, dissolving the Assembly where bourgeois politicians sought power and proclaiming himself emperor – independent of class and party – as Napoleon III. Marx responded to this unexpected and distressing outcome, as I tried to show some years ago, with a marked inversion of his historical theory: accounting for historical events required showing how revolutionary struggle dissolved class unity instead of consummating it. Had the revolution not had this effect, bourgeois and proletarians would have confronted each other as singular agents, preparing the final struggle that would transform society. Marx continued to believe that this conflict would come someday, but he had to project it into a more distant (and as it turned out ever-receding) future.15

  Marx failed to predict the future history of class relations but he defined the terms in which many later writers would seek to consider them: do classes possess a real or potential unity that allows them to act for themselves and against others or are they assemblages of diverse parts that never effectively cohere? With regard to the bourgeoisie in particular, three separate answers have been given. Some historians and theorists have taken positions close to Marx’s, attributing an essential unity to the bourgeoisie on the ground that all its members depend somehow on those who own and run the means of production and must eventually act in accord with them; others have denied such unity altogether, pointing to multiple instances of division and opposition between, say, French bureaucrats and industrialists, German Bildungsbürger and Wirtschaftsbürger (respectively people who were bourgeois by virtue of education, or of economic position), London financiers and provincial manufacturers, urban and rural property owners, or “old” and “new” bourgeois in the same city; a third group has acknowledged many differences between various kinds of bourgeois while still arguing that class unity of a kind exists or can come about by way of participation in a common “spirit,” culture, or “style of life.”16

  Although each of these positions may have something to recommend it, the objections that arise against all of them are weighty enough to require that we look beyond them. The kind of unity posited by Marx’s theory is at best ephemeral or momentary and at worst merely imagined. There is no instance in modern history of a bourgeois class on a more than local scale ever acting as a unified and independent agent against other social groupings over a significant span of time; even inside particular towns and cities a variety of groups all in their way bourgeois often contended against each other. Appeals to such a unity have often served as rhetorical screens behind which some particular sub-group or self-constituted body of representatives or leaders claims a particular political goal – commercial freedom or protection, support for or opposition to a given political regime, an expanded or limited suffrage – as embodying the bourgeoisie’s presumed shared interest, or its historical role or destiny. What the recurrence of such visions attests is that the bourgeoisie, like other social classes, fits the description Benedict Anderson famously gave of nations: they are “imagined communities.” Classes like nations are contested categories, so that even if some particular version of how one or another might be unified succeeds temporarily in representing it, such attempts are signs of an ongoing and in the end unresolvable debate about what it is or ought to be.

  To think about the bourgeoisie as essentially constituted by capitalist industry and to see those bourgeois not directly involved in business or finance as accessories or servants of capitalists made perfect sense as part of Marx’s larger political and intellectual project: because he conceived the socialist future in terms of working-class control over the means of industrial production, it made sense in his schema to define the bourgeoisie in the same way. But such a perspective creates a false parallel between the two classes, radically narrowing both the social basis of bourgeois existence and (as I have been arguing) the nature of the means by which bourgeois activities generate power in social relations: political and cultural action each bring forth independent forms of social power. Failure to recognize this was one reason (together with similar impediments to the reality of working-class unity) why faith in Marx’s predictions led many of his disciples along the dark and sometimes tragic paths they followed.

  The opposite perspective, from which the bourgeoisie appears as a mere assemblage of groups with only accidental connections to each other, is equally unsatisfactory. It often takes the negative form of labeling as “middle class” all those who are neither peasants or workers on the one side, nor aristocrats by birth on the other. Such a notion of bourgeois identity as being neither one thing nor another seems to make a certain sense when applied to the conditions of the Old Regime, where the aristocratic power of the few and the peasant status of the great majority strongly marked social life. There is no doubt that bourgeois activities (not by themselves, however, as I will have occasion to insist) did much to put an end to this situation. But viewing social relations in this way obscures the crucial point that many people thereby categorized as middle class or bourgeois were deeply inserted into Old Regime practices and attitudes and loyal to the authorities and values that sustained them. In the singular, “middle class” implies a kind of unity that those who are named by it never possessed, whereas in the plural “middle classes” crumbles into a heap of interpretive dust. The notion of being-in-the-middle, whatever its relationship to Aristotle’s claims about the moral superiority of those who incarnate the golden mean over those who embody one or the other extreme, provides no clue to what makes bourgeois life especially relevant to modernity.

  The third strategy, recognizing the manifold differences between various species of bourgeois but positing a generic unity that overcomes the divisions through the development of a common culture, based on values, beliefs, or learned behavior, seems much more attractive on the surface, and it has drawn the loyalty of some distinguished historians of bourgeois life, including Adeline Daumard in France and Jürgen Kocka in Germany. But its validity is very limited. One reason is that it remains too much rooted in the Marxist assumption that real or potential unity is an essential condition of class as a social category. In the Marxist schema, where history’s meaning resides in the successive replacement of one dominant class by another, culminating in the end of class differences, achieving such unity is essential since without it history cannot be driven forward. But historical development has lef
t this scenario in tatters, and taking it off the table allows us to see that the real but less portentous power bourgeois possess does not require class unity to sustain it. To be a banker, a state official, a lawyer or doctor is sufficient in itself to be able to influence the outcome of social interactions in ways that factory workers, lower-level service employees or day laborers cannot; no process of “class formation” is required. To be sure, sharing values and attitudes, forms of dress, and preferences in leisure and culture, all provide people with grounds for mutual recognition and identification. But such commonalities do not overcome the divisions of occupation, interest, or conviction that persist inside the bourgeoisie, they merely coexist with them.17

  In place of the debate about whether what predominates in bourgeois existence is unity or division, these considerations suggest that we need to develop an understanding that makes the modern bourgeoisie’s simultaneous and enduring mix of singularity and diversity constitutive of its existence. Between the various forms of bourgeois activity there exists not any overarching unity in potentia, but – to adopt another famous phrase from Ludwig Wittgenstein – a “family resemblance,” a kinship that ties individuals together without eliminating the tensions and conflicts that arise between them. It is such a family resemblance that constitutes what identity the bourgeoisie possesses as a social class. Its history is not the story of its development toward unity and collective agency, but of its evolution inside the three networks of means that provide the ground for its activities, and of the shifting relations that obtain both among its segments, and between them and people whose social being is constituted on a different basis.