On First Thoughts today, I defend the bourgeoisie:
An essential function of the bourgeois industrialist in modern society is to mediate between the wealthy investors and the employees. He knows and understands them both, and wants to keep both happy, whereas they do not know or understand one another and are not strongly motivated to look out for one another’s legitimate interests.
You write that economic exchange must take place within a social space that presupposes bonds that are prior to (i.e. not dependent upon) economic exchange. Yes, it certainly does—and the bourgeois industrialist, who is culturally bilingual and can speak to, and be trusted by, both the rich and the poor is the only person in the system who makes that sociologically possible. If you turn the man in the middle into a villain, you will soon find yourself with nothing but a naked war between the top and the bottom.
I may be turning into a Marxist, because to be honest, I am starting to wonder how much there really is to all the big-picture critiques of modern life that isn’t either the selfish resentment of the aristocracy (on the traditionalist Right) or the selfish resentment of the masses (on the redistributionist Left) against the fact that the bourgeoisie has usurped what they feel is their rightful place at the top of society. How much, really, of the great critique of “modernity” from such figures as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre is just snobbery at the inability of the bourgeois to achieve the elevated cultural tastes of the aristocracy?
Perhaps I’m being uncharitable. But I have yet to hear any kind of convincing answer from the cultured despisers of the bourgeois to the question at the end of my FT post. Is it not bourgeois society that has, uniquely in all of history, given us religious freedom, representative democracy, individual rights to fair treatment, entrepreneurial economics, and equal dignity for women? Do we not value these, or is there some other blessing we ought to value more? Or is there a plausible plan for retaining these things after the bourgeois have been cast out of power?
Image HT
Here’s a different challenge. How can we salvage the good elements of bourgeois culture while at the same time renouncing the British East India Company, the railroad-promoting Land Grants, the corporatism of the Progressive era, and other “props” that have made bourgeois culture seem possible for so long?
But as someone who is not particularly a despiser of bourgeois culture–rather, as one who wonders whether it is one thing or a succession of quite different things–I’ll try to take this on in a future post, just to keep the pot well stirred.
It’s been quite a while. I hope to be more active during the summer.
That seems pretty easy to me! Some of the things you list don’t seem bad to me (I wasn’t aware the land grants were out of fashion these days) and some don’t seem to be products of bourgieos culture (the Progressive movement and other corporatisms seem to me very clearly to represent a movement away from the bourgieos to the masses – if that’s bourgieos, what is not?). But I’m not saying that bourgeois culture produces no evils. I’m saying that weighing the good and the bad together, we get a better overall deal from the bourgeois than from either the aristocracy or the masses. Easy peasy!