BOURGEOIS CLASS

	BOURGEOIS CLASS
	Sociologyindex	Sociology Books 2008
	Bourgeois was originally a (particularly French) citizen or freeman of a city or burgh, as distinct from a peasant or a gentleman. Now, bourgeois is any member of the middle class. "Bourgeois" was formally a legal category in society, defined by conditions such as length of residence and source of income. In feudal time the cities had become the place of business and residence of a growing class of merchants, professionals and crafts persons, who came to be seen as having a social status between the peasant class and the land owning or aristocratic class. Hence the idea that they were the middle class. The artisans and tradesmen began to emerge as an economic force. They formed guilds, associations and companies to conduct business and promote their own interests and became the original bourgeoisie. This new bourgeois or middle class came to feel oppressed by the traditions and restrictions of feudalism and aristocratic rule and eventually were able to grasp power and transform social values. The bourgeoisie was initially accused of narrow-mindedness, materialism, hypocrisy, opposition to change, and lack of culture by Molière and Flaubert, who denounced its banality and mercenary aspirations. Bourgeois are associated with the bloodless revolution of Great Britain in 1688 and the French Revolution in 1789. This new class also had a distinctive life style that came to be referred to as ‘bourgeois’. The term bourgeois class, or bourgeoisie, was used by Marx to refer to the corporate or capitalist class in modern societies that is thought, particularly in socialist ideas, to be also a ruling class.

The Buoyant Class: Bourgeois Family Lineage in the Life Stories of Czech Business Elite Persons
Vladimir Andrle, Department of Sociology The University of York
Life-story interviews carried out in the Czech Republic confirm that the new business elite is dominated by men who had already achieved high managerial positions in the Communist era. More surprisingly, however, they also reveal a marked overrepresentation within this group of descendants of the national bourgeoisie that was expropriated when the Communists came to power in 1948. These `buoyant class' life stories show some of the ways in which children of bourgeois lineage were able to negotiate their way around the Communist regime's `class politics'. They also show how bourgeois family lineage can now be used as a resource for averting the potential moral stigma of a Communist-era senior executive career. The `buoyant class' appears to be a self-confident and significant component of the new Czech business elite. - soc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/35/4/815

Bourgeois Bohemians in China? Neo-Tribes and the Urban Imaginary1
China Quarterly, No. 183, September, 2005.
Jing Wang MIT - Full-text - web.mit.edu/fll/www/people/bobos%20in%20china.pdf
Abstract: This article treats an understudied subject in popular culture studies: the mutual feed between
lifestyle cultures and marketing through an examination of the Bobo fever in urban China. How
did an imaginary class "bourgeois bohemians" emerge in a country where the bourgeois base is
statistically small and where the bohemian equation is non-existent? To shed light on this popculture-
turned-marketing-fad syndrome, the article introduces the concept of the "neo-tribes" and
maps the pathways that link style cultures to consumer segmentation. A couple of critical
questions arise from this exercise. First, is the separability of taste from class symptomatic of a
"Chinese leap of faith"? And secondly, is the hottest market segment today - the "neo-neotribes"
-- preparing us to address the convergence of a global youth culture?

Maria Ossowska
Moral Philosopher or Sociologist of Morals?
Marcin T. Zdrenka, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland
Bourgeois morality, psychology of morality and sociology of morality.
Maria Ossowska (1896–1974) was focused on the problem of a sociology of morality. At the time she was writing, a sociology of morals was not generally considered proper subject matter for moral philosophers. Yet ethics was already showing its weakness and calling out for a new reformulation. Maria Ossowska formulated a new project for moral philosophy involving a sociological perspective which not only understood ‘morality’ as a social phenomenon which could be researched with sociological methods, but which also understood itself as remaining inextricably related to philosophical reflection. She divided her new ‘moral science’ into three parts: (1) an analysis of moral evaluations and norms; (2) a psychology of morality; and (3) a sociology of morality. In developing this program, Ossowska worked upon various themes or areas, including the moral thought of the British Enlightenment, the chivalrous ethos and bourgeois morality. She introduced and newly reformulated the term ‘ethos’, intending it both as a term of sociology and as related to normative ethics, which is part of moral philosophy. Ossowska%'s most general achievement was to widen awareness in both philosophy and sociology of a new necessary complexity and depth to any moral studies. - jcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/3/311

Legal Positivism and Bourgeois Materialism: Max Weber's View of the Sociology of Law
Martin Albrow
British Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Summer, 1975), pp. 14-31
doi:10.2307/1409782

A Critique of Contemporary Bourgeois Sociology. by A. I. Demidenko
Review author[s]: Konstantin Symmons
American Sociological Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Feb., 1960), pp. 121-122
doi:10.2307/2088959