LITMIR.BIZ

      But speaks to us, only through the medium of form. Stories, and styles: that’s where I found the bourgeois. Styles, especially; which came as quite a surprise, considering how often narratives are viewed as the foundations of social identity,²⁸ and how frequently the bourgeoisie has been identified with turbulence and change—from some famous scenes of the Phenomenology, to the Manifesto’s ‘all that is solid melts into air’, and Schumpeter’s creative destruction. So, I expected bourgeois literature to be defined by new and unpredictable plots: ‘leaps into the dark’, as Elster writes of capitalist innovations.²⁹ And instead, as I argue in ‘Serious Century’, the opposite seems to have been the case: regularity, not disequilibrium, was the great narrative invention of bourgeois Europe.³⁰ All that was solid, became more so.

      Why? The main reason lies probably in the bourgeois himself. In the course of the nineteenth century, once the stigma against ‘new wealth’ had been overcome, a few recurrent traits clustered around this figure: energy, first of all; self-restraint; intellectual clarity; commercial honesty; a strong sense of goals. All ‘good’ traits; but not good enough to match the type of narrative hero—warrior, knight, conqueror, adventurer—on whom Western story-telling had relied for, literally, millennia. ‘The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail’, wrote Schumpeter, mockingly; and business life—‘in the office, among columns of figures’—is doomed to be ‘essentially unheroic’.³¹ It’s a major discontinuity between the old and the new ruling class: whereas the aristocracy had shamelessly idealized itself in a whole gallery of intrepid knights, the bourgeoisie produced no such myth of itself. The great mechanism of adventure was being eroded by bourgeois civilization—and without adventure, characters lost the stamp of uniqueness that comes from the encounter with the unknown.³² Compared to a knight, a bourgeois appears un-marked and elusive; similar to any other bourgeois. Here is a scene from the beginning of North and South, where the heroine describes a Manchester industrialist to her mother:

      ‘Oh! I hardly know what he is like’, said Margaret . . . ‘About thirty, with a face that is neither exactly plain, nor yet handsome, nothing remarkable—not quite a gentleman; but that was hardly to be expected.’

      ‘Not vulgar, or common, though’, put in her father . . .³³

      Hardly, about, neither exactly, nor yet, nothing, not quite . . . Margaret’s judgment, usually quite sharp, loses itself in a spiral of evasions. It’s the abstraction of the bourgeois type: in his extreme form, mere ‘capital personified’, or even just ‘a machine for the transformation of surplus-value into surplus capital’, to quote a couple of passages from Capital.³⁴ In Marx, as later in Weber, the methodical suppression of all sensuous traits makes it hard to imagine how this character could ever be the centre of an interesting story—unless of course self-repression is the story, as in Mann’s portrait of consul Thomas Buddenbrook (which made a profound impression on Weber himself).³⁵ Things are different in an earlier period, or at the margins of capitalist Europe, where the weakness of capitalism as a system leaves much greater freedom to imagine powerful individual figures like Robinson Crusoe, Gesualdo Motta, or Stanislaw Wokulski. But where capitalistic structures solidify, narrative and stylistic mechanisms replace individuals as the centre of the text. It’s another way to look at the structure of this book: two chapters on bourgeois characters—and two on bourgeois language.

      I found the bourgeois in styles more than stories, I said a few pages ago, and by ‘styles’ I meant mostly two things: prose, and keywords. The rhetoric of prose will come into view gradually, one aspect at a time (continuity, precision, productivity, neutrality . . .), in the first two chapters of the book, where I chart its ascending arc through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has been a great achievement, bourgeois prose—and a very laborious one. The absence from its universe of any concept of ‘inspiration’—this gift from the gods, where idea and results merge magically in a single instant of creation—suggests how impossible it is to imagine the medium of prose without immediately thinking of work. Linguistic work, to be sure, but of such a kind that it embodies some of the most typical features of bourgeois activity. If The Bourgeois has a protagonist, this laborious prose is certainly it.

      The prose I have just outlined is an ideal-type, never fully realized in any specific text. Keywords, no; they are actual words, used by real writers, and perfectly traceable to this or that book. Here, the conceptual frame has been set decades ago by Raymond Williams, in Culture & Society and Keywords, and by Reinhart Koselleck’s work on Begriffgeschichte. For Koselleck, who focuses on the political language of modern Europe, ‘a concept is not simply indicative of the relations which it covers; it is also a factor within them’;³⁶ more precisely, it is a factor that institutes a ‘tension’ between language and reality, and is often ‘consciously deployed as a weapon’.³⁷ Though a great model for intellectual history, this approach is probably unsuited to a social being who, as Groethuysen puts it, ‘acts, but doesn’t speak much’;³⁸ and when he speaks, prefers casual and everyday terms to the intellectual clarity of concepts. ‘Weapon’ is thus certainly the wrong term for pragmatic and constructive keywords such as ‘useful’, ‘efficiency’, ‘serious’—not to mention great mediators like ‘comfort’ or ‘influence’, much closer to Benveniste’s idea of language as ‘the instrument by which the world and society are adjusted ’³⁹ than to Koselleck’s ‘tension’. It is hardly an accident, I think, that so many of my keywords have turned out to be adjectives: less central than nouns (let alone concepts) to a culture’s semantic system, adjectives are unsystematic and indeed ‘adjustable’; or, as Humpty Dumpty would scornfully say, ‘adjectives, you can do anything with’.⁴⁰

      Prose, and keywords: two parallel threads that will resurface throughout the argument, at the different scales of paragraphs, sentences, and individual words. Through them, the peculiarities of bourgeois culture will emerge from the implicit, and even buried dimension of language: a ‘mentality’ made of unconscious grammatical patterns and semantic associations, more than clear and distinct ideas. This was not the original plan of the book, and there are moments when I’m still taken aback by the fact that the pages on Victorian adjectives may be the conceptual centre of The Bourgeois. But if the ideas of the bourgeois have received plenty of attention, his mentality—aside from a few isolated attempts, like Groethuysen’s study almost a century ago—remains still largely unexplored; and then, the minutiae of language reveal secrets that great ideas often mask: the friction between new