Bourgeoisie

BIBLIOGRAPHY

In classical Marxian theory, bourgeoisie refers to the ruling class of capitalist society. Superseding the feudal aristocracy, its origins have been traced to a relatively early stage in capitalist development, when it was defined by ownership of the means of production. Since the 1800s the functions of management and ownership have become separated, however. As this has occurred, the explanatory value of the term bourgeoisie has become attenuated, particularly in discussions of advanced or late capitalism in the era of finance.

In French, bourgeoisie originally referred to the society of free men in towns, implying a citizen subject to civil law. The German political philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1882) and his collaborator, the German socialist Friedrich (also spelled Frederick) Engels (1820–1895), understood the bourgeoisie to have emerged from the class of “chartered burghers” in medieval towns, and in their works they trace the development of this class through several stages, from relative oppression under the feudal nobility, to militarized self-governing associations, to independent republics and taxable estates. They also linked the rise of this class to the simplification of class antagonism into a fundamentally binary opposition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Marx never described the actual composition of the bourgeoisie as completely as he described the proletariat, and often the term appears to be interchangeable with capitalist.

The factors facilitating the rise of the bourgeoisie were both economic and geopolitical, and these two were related. In Marx’s analysis, the drive to accumulation inherent in capitalism must be understood in terms of two kinds of capital, including constant capital (the value of the means of production) and variable capital (the value of labor power). Any expansion in total capital requires a growth in variable capital, which is generally achieved through the enhancement of technological means enabling the increased productivity of labor. A contradiction lies at the heart of this relation, however, for the variable portion of the capital grows more slowly than does the constant portion. This is overcome, says Marx, by increasing the scale of production; the larger the enterprise, the more capacity for accumulation it will have.

The process is, nonetheless, not linear. To begin with, the drive to accumulation generates competition among different capitalists. The result is a complex dialectic between accumulation and concentration, as well as centralization. In this environment, large-scale capital is not only advantaged in relation to smaller capital, because it can control more labor, but it grows at the expense of smaller capital. Such centralization is made possible by the credit system. Moreover, as the economist Rudolf Hilferding has argued, it is the merging of banking and industrial capital that permits and actualizes this centralizating dynamic—though not without countervailing pressures.

Through the credit system, the idle money that accumulates in the course of production is gathered together and made available for investment in production. Time is of the essence here, for the period during which money is not invested in production is, from the perspective of capital, lost. What the banks do, then, is permit enterprises to keep their own money in production, while still being able to draw on it for enhancement or expansion when opportunity arises. When assisted by banking institutions, the corporations no longer have to keep their money in reserve for such opportunities. There is, then, a phantomatic extension of the corporation through credit.

At the same time, other institutions, such as the stock market, permit the creation of joint-stock companies in which collectivities rather than individuals come to function as owners. This “special institution,” as Hilferding termed it, provides a market for “titles to interest, or fictitious capital ” (1981, pp. 107–180). Money is transformed into productive capital through the stock market because the shareholders only expect a return on the yield of the company, and their sale of title does not lead to a withdrawal of money from the corporation’s productive machinery.

In this sense, the shareholder is not an owner of the means of production. He is, rather, representative of a new kind of capitalist, a money capitalist, defined by Hilferding as one liberated from the status of industrial entrepreneur. Like the manager, his actions serve the interests of the company and hence of corporate capital, but only in an extremely mediated fashion. Accordingly, many thinkers, most notably Nicos Poulantzas, argue for a reconceptualization of the bourgeoisie as a class defined not by ownership of the means of production but by the function of economic control. Others have disputed this and have preferred to see managers as special kinds of wage laborers.

With the rise of the stock market, and speculation more generally, the creation of value appears to become increasingly separated from the question of production. Initially, this market sought to attract large-scale capital, accumulated by members of a relatively conventional bourgeoisie. Other institutions, such as mutual funds, have extended this process however and, consequently, helped to disseminate the capitalist ideal even among those who are merely wage laborers. They represent a profound cultural transformation and may perhaps help explain the subversion of class consciousness in social milieus defined by financialization. Nonetheless, it is important to understand that industrial capital continues to play a crucial rule even in financialized contexts, and the vast majority of the world’s labor remains engaged within it, even though a disproportionate amount of value is produced in and by financial capital.

The forces that would ultimately lead to the political and social transformation of capitalism were, Hilferding thought, internal to capitalism itself. Other, liberal theorists agreed, though for different reasons. Adolf Berle, for example, saw the concentration and centralization of capital in the huge corporations of the United States in the mid-twentieth century as a direct product of joint stock organization. But while relying upon state regulation, which, for example, provides tax incentives for philanthropic giving, Berle argued that the new corporations themselves assumed a “quasi-political” role. He argued further that the greatest incentive to corporate growth and rationalization is the threat of competition from state enterprises. Corporate investment in local infrastructural development and education as well as international diplomacy carried out by corporate representatives constitutes, for Berle, the hallmark of a specifically American form of corporatist capitalism whose defining attribute is its antipathy to statism.

Berle’s conception of what might be termed, in an idiom coined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, corporate “governmentality” may be contrasted to Marx’s original conception of the relationship between bourgeois political and economic form. Marx had argued that the bourgeoisie assumed economic predominance partly through its development of a political form capable of representing its interests, namely bourgeois democracy. Although a national entity, the bourgeois democratic state was nonetheless made possible only by the reordering of local economies in colonial territories—to produce markets for European goods and to permit the extraction of natural resources for processing in metropolitan centers or, later, to serve as export processing zones. Hilferding went so far as to argue that the inhibiting influences of cartelization and protectionism within European states could only be overcome by outward expansion, and hence that the development of European capital led inevitably to imperialism, a thesis shared in different ways by both the Russian Communist thinkers Nikolay Bukharin (1888–1938) and Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924).

Toward the end of the twentieth century, economic theorists began to observe a rupture in the relationship between nation-states and corporate capital, and a super-session of the bourgeois nation-state by regional trade bodies and economic consortia (such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Union, and the G8) that, while backed by the governmental authority of nation-states, attempt to ensure that domestic protectionism, which might have been deployed by national capital, does not inhibit the expansion of capital, per se. As Hilferding anticipated, financial institutions have assumed an increasingly dominant role in such contexts, and access to credit has become a significant index of economic power for both corporations and individual persons. The development of a sphere of value-creation relatively unmoored from production, through currency trading, real estate speculation, and derivatives trading, suggests that the old bourgeoisie has not only been liberated from the function of industrial entrepreneur but that the money capitalist has become the new bearer of capital’s own self-interest.

SEE ALSO Capitalism; European Union; G8 Countries; Globalization, Social and Economic Aspects of; Marx, Karl; Marxism; North American Free Trade Agreement; Poulantzas, Nicos

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berle, Adolf. 1932. The Modern Corporation and Private Property. New York: Commerce Clearing House.

Berle, Adolf. 1954. The Twentieth-Century Capitalist Revolution. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Hilferding, Rudolf. 1981. Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development. Trans. Morris Watnick and Sam Gordon. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Mandel, Ernest. 1978. Late Capitalism. Trans. Joris de Bres. New York: Verso.

Marx, Karl. 1978. The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 10, 45–145. New York: International Publishers. (Orig. pub. 1850).

Marx, Karl. 1992. Capital. Vols. 1 and 3. Ed. and intro. C. J. Arthur. London: Lawrence and Wishart. (Orig. pub. 1867, 1885, 1894).

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1998. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Verso. (Orig. pub. 1848).

Poulantzas, Nicos. 1978. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. Trans. David Fernbach. New York: Verso.

Rosalind C. Morris

bourgeoisie Originally a sixteenth-century French term referring to the body of urban freemen, which gradually became interchangeable with the term capitalist class, especially amongst Marxists. Current usage refers to the owners of the means of production in capitalist societies—although, because of the decomposition of capital, the term now has doctrinaire connotations and appears slightly dated.

Among non-Marxists, the applicability of the term in more advanced capitalist countries has been regularly questioned, especially since the 1930s. For example, Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means (The Modern Corporation and Private Property, 1932) argued that because of the separation between ownership and control which became apparent in larger American corporations during the 1930s, economic power was beginning to pass from the owner-entrepreneurs (capitalists) to the managers. Similar and again highly influential arguments appeared in the 1950s (see, for example, Daniel Bell's article on the decline of family capitalism which is reprinted in his The End of Ideology, 1960), and again in the 1960s, when in his book The New Industrial State (1967) John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term ‘technostructure’ to refer to the institutional rather than personal nature of power in modern economies. According to Galbraith, the rise of the modern corporation has replaced the entrepreneur, as an identifiable individual and as a directing force in the enterprise, by a collective ‘guiding intelligence’ embracing all those functionaries located between the levels of senior management and junior staff (the technocracy), who contribute to group decision-making for and on behalf of the organization which they form.

More recently, this change in analytical focus has gained still greater momentum with the development of the subdiscipline of business history, and in particular the appearance of Alfred D. Chandler's studies of organizational change in large American companies (see, for example, his The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, 1977
). The summation of this whole line of argument probably came with the publication of Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), with its claim that the new centrality of knowledge in the production process had changed not only the distribution of economic power, but also its very nature.

Concerning the issue of ownership more specifically, scholars (and of course some politicians) have claimed that the ever-wider dispersion of shares and the accompanying increase in the proportion of shares owned by pension funds and other financial intermediaries, have both transformed and made more democratic the structure of ownership in advanced capitalist societies (see, for example, P. F. Drucker 's The Unseen Revolution, 1976
).

The response of Marxists, and those that agree with them on this issue, has been twofold. On the one hand, it has been argued that empirical studies demonstrate that the powers of individual owners have not declined much, and certainly not as radically as has been claimed. On the contrary, according to these researchers, the more widespread share ownership only means that it is now often possible to have a very significant impact on the manner in which the still very considerable powers of boards of directors are exercised (for example with regard to investment decisions), whilst owning only a single-figure percentage of the shares. Moreover, as has been argued more recently by those interested in ownership networks, because of the power that comes with the ownership of relatively small parcels of shares, and especially if these shares are in large, market-dominating companies, it is possible that their owners may come to exercise power far beyond the confines of their base company, either through that company's holdings, or as owners on their own account. (See, for example, the article by B. Mintz and and M. Schwartz in S. Zukin and and P. DiMaggio ( eds.) , Structures of Capital, 1990
, or J. Scott's Who Rules Britain?, 1990.)

The second thrust of the Marxist response to arguments about ownership and control has been more theoretical, and comprises a claim that the issue of personal versus institutional ownership only presents problems because of a residual humanism in much Marxist thinking, a tendency which requires one to give theoretical priority to the identification of the concrete bearers of property relations (that is, specific individuals), rather than (following Marx's sixth thesis on Feuerbach) to the identification of the social relations of possession, control, and title that constitute these bearers themselves. If the latter are given theoretical priority, then because the bearers so constituted may be either humans or institutions one may talk of the existence of something called a capitalist class, if not necessarily of a clearly defined body of people recognizable as a bourgeoisie, regardless of the concrete nature of, or relations between, its bearers (see, for example, A. Woodiwiss , Social Theory after Postmodernism, 1990
). See also MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION; MIDDLE CLASS.

Léon Bourgeois

The French statesman Léon Bourgeois (1851-1925) was one of the earliest proponents of the League of Nations and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1920.

Léon Bourgeois was born on May 29, 1851, in Paris. He studied law in Paris and entered the civil service in 1876. By 1887 he was prefect of police for the department of the Seine.

Bourgeois's political career began in 1888, when he represented the Marne Department in the Chamber of Deputies. He established a reputation as one of the young leaders of the Radicals in the Chamber. From 1888 to 1895 he urged a number of social and economic reforms and established an independent position that was not identified with the old Radical program. He served as a Cabinet minister in several governments before 1895.

Because of his emphasis on a specific and comprehensive program of reform as constituting the very essence of radicalism, Bourgeois gained support from the left and organized a government. On Nov. 1, 1895, he became premier. As a result of opposition in the conservative Senate against any plan of social reform, a constitutional struggle developed over the Senate's right to veto budgetary supply, and Bourgeois was forced to resign on April 21, 1896.

The program of Bourgeois's government centered on reforms specifically directed toward the underprivileged: a progressive income tax, the extension of pension plans and of social security, and insurance programs. Bourgeois and his program were not socialist, though this accusation was leveled against him many times. His government was unable to achieve any of its specific goals, but it did encourage the cause of reform and was the first government to be supported by the Socialists.

Bourgeois served as head of the French delegations to the First and Second Hague Conferences in 1899 and 1907, where, according to a colleague, he "expressed commonplace thoughts in a mellow voice." He was elected to the Senate in 1905. In 1916 and 1917 he was for a time minister of labor in Aristide Briand's wartime Cabinet. Bourgeois was president of the Senate from 1920 to 1923.

Bourgeois had been one of the original proponents of a league of nations. When the Paris Peace Conference took up the question in 1919, the French government designated him as the representative to the special committee whose task was the drafting of the Covenant of the League of Nations. When the League was in operation, he became the chief representative for France and served in both the Council and Assembly.

In 1923 Bourgeois gave up his position in the League because of illness. He died at his country estate near Épernay on Sept. 25, 1925.

Further Reading

Guy Chapman, The Third Republic of France (1962), includes a scholarly evaluation of Bourgeois's political influence as well as some biographical information. See also Edward Mead Earle, ed., Modern France: Problems of the Third and Fourth Republic (1951). H. Schück and others, Nobel: The Man and His Prizes (1950; 2d ed. 1962), and Mortimer Lipsky, Quest for Peace: The Story of the Nobel Award (1966), discuss Bourgeois's work for peace. □

Léon Bourgeois , 1851–1925, French statesman and social philosopher. He held cabinet posts, notably the premiership (1895–96) and was a delegate to the first and second Hague peace conferences and a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. One of the earliest proponents of the League of Nations, he headed the French delegation in the League. In 1920 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His influential book, Solidarité (1896), advocated the use of public authority to achieve the solidarity increasingly necessary within and among nations.

bourgeoisie , originally the name for the inhabitants of walled towns in medieval France; as artisans and craftsmen, the bourgeoisie occupied a socioeconomic position between the peasants and the landlords in the countryside. The term was extended to include the middle class of France and subsequently of other nations. The word bourgeois has also long been used to imply an outlook associated with materialism, narrowness, and lack of culture—these characteristics were early satirized by Molière and have continued to be a subject of literary analysis.

Origins and Rise

The bourgeoisie as a historical phenomenon did not begin to emerge until the development of medieval cities as centers for trade and commerce in Central and Western Europe, beginning in the 11th cent. The bourgeoisie, or merchants and artisans, began to organize themselves into corporations as a result of their conflict with the landed proprietors. At the end of the Middle Ages, under the early national monarchies in Western Europe, the bourgeoisie found it in their interests to support the throne against the feudal disorder of competing local authorities. In England and the Netherlands, the bourgeoisie was the driving force in uprooting feudalism in the late 16th and early 17th cent.

In the 17th and 18th cent., the bourgeoisie supported principles of constitutionality and natural right, against the claims of divine right and against the privileges held by nobles and prelates. The English, American, and French revolutions derived partly from the desire of the bourgeoisie to rid itself of feudal trammels and royal encroachments on personal liberty and on the rights of trade and property. In the 19th cent., the bourgeoisie, triumphantly propounding liberalism, gained political rights as well as religious and civil liberties. Thus modern Western society, in its political and also in its cultural aspects, owes much to bourgeois activities and philosophy.

Subsequent to the Industrial Revolution, the class greatly expanded, and differences within it became more distinct, notably between the high bourgeois (industrialists and bankers) and the petty bourgeois (tradesmen and white-collar workers). By the end of the 19th cent., the capitalists (the original bourgeois) tended to be associated with a widened upper class, while the spread of technology and technical occupations was opening the bourgeoisie to entry from below.

In Marxism

Within Karl Marx 's theory of class struggle, the bourgeoisie plays a significant role. By overthrowing the feudal system it is seen as an originally progressive force that later becomes a reactionary force as it tries to prevent the ascendency of the proletariat (wage earners) in order to maintain its own position of predominance. Some writers argue that Marx's theory fails because he did not foresee the rise of a new, expanded middle class of professionals and managers, which, although they are wage earners, do not fit easily into his definition of the proletariat.

Bibliography

See H. Pirenne, Medieval Cities (1952) and Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe (1956); D. Johnson, ed., Class and Social Development (1982); P. Gay, The Bourgeois Experience (Vol. I–V, 1984–98).

bourgeoisie (middle class) Term originally applied to artisans and craftsmen who lived in medieval French towns. Up to the late 18th century it was a propertied but relatively unprivileged class, often of urban merchants and tradesmen, who helped speed the decline of the feudal system. The 19th-century advent of capitalism led to the expansion of the bourgeoisie and its division into the high (industrialists and financiers) and petty (tradesmen, clerical workers) bourgeoisie.

Bourgeoisie

bourgeois collectively or as a class, the French middle class, 1707; also extended to other nationalities.

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