I was reading though through a thread here here and it reminded me of something.
The OP of that thread was rather Bohemian and seemed to have a hatred for the “Bourgouis”.
According to my dictionary, that’s the middle class. You know, the people who own the small business, who do most of the labor in society, own homes, pay bills, stuff like that.
My question is: Why? If you truely insist on hating a class, shouldn’t it be the rich, who don’t work as hard(if at all) for a living, have a lot more to fall back on, can send their kids to any college they can buy a wing for, and tend to be CEO’s of companies that pollute the environment, “oppress the workers”, and fire people to line their own pocketbooks then cut services anyway?
Since when did the middle class become the bad guys to the bohemian mind, so it speaks?
“Middle class” then isn’t what “middle class” is now.
Coming from a social structure where there were nobility/The Rich ™, there were landowners, and there were the workers, it makes more sense. Even in post-serfdom Russia, the workers were all but literally tied to the land by the “middle class” land owners, and later, tied to the factories by the “middle class” factory owners.
The question you should be asking is, “when did middle class become the good guys.”
It has something to do with the development of modern industrial societies. During the Middle Ages, the “upper” class was the nobility - they possessed the land, the government officials were recruited among them, and the like, and a non-noble, however talented he might have been, had no chance to work himself up. Then, when the industrial revolution came, non-noble entrepreneur families made fortunes, and the differentiation between the old money (nobility) and the new money (non-noble capitalists, bourgeois) came up. The former continued to somewhat despise the latter, although often the bourgeois were much richer than the nobles. Sometimes bourgeois tried to imitate the nobility’s lifestyle or became noble themselves by getting knighted by the monarch.
(This shift from a feudal society dominated by rich nobles to a capitalist society dominated by non-noble entrepreneurs plays an important role in Marxist theory, claiming that this shift didn’t change the conditions of the working class since it doesn’t matter if they’re exploited by nobles or bourgeois).
Since then, the term “bourgeois” has, however, undergone a change in meaning. It is often used to refer to wealthy middle-class people with conservative, old-fashioned or prudish views. views. Depends on the context.
As Zagadka already said, in modern western societies “bourgeois” has a positive connotation. Nowadays the majority of people in those states belongs to the middle class; in the 19th century, it was a minority.
Also, “bourgeois” has added upon it the meaning of those people from the non-rich-but-making-a-decent-living classes who have embraced capitalistic social values, rather than recognizing the system as corrupt and ID’ing themselves with “The Working Masses”. The “decadence” association comes from both directions: the poor, of course, have to live stoically because it’s all they can afford. The nobility, except for the very top royalty, has to be careful to not spend themselves broke since they have only X amount of land to sell off and it’s beneath them to work. The bourgeois capitalists actually have INCOME to spend on themselves. And they do.
As to " bohemians" … well, I don’t know any proletarian “bohemians” . Proletarians are too busy working for their food to sit around being intellectually counter-cultural, you NEED a bourgeois capitalist society to breed " bohemians"-as-we-know-them .
Agreed JRD. There is a term “bobo”, which is a combination of “bourgeois” and “bohemian”. It’s kind of ironic that bohemians look down on the bourgeoisie and yet come from it. It’s also ironic that this is often pointed out by people like me, who probably fall in that category.
Here’s a definition of “bobo”. I take back what I said: I definitely don’t fit in this category. (I think I might be more of a hipster bohemian - a hippo?)
What on earth am I? I’m a free-spirited, soap-making, peace-lovin’ hippie type with four kids and a scraping-by income…and I’m content with it for the time being. If I could change anything, I’d like to make a little more money, but I don’t have any desire to be rich or have a huge house. A nice big kitchen, maybe, but I don’t feel a need for four bathrooms, y’know?
I’d hate to think I just have a boring ol’ label like “working poor,” when there are all those nifty sounding titles out there for other folks…