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      13 ‘The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie’ (1902), in Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, Los Angeles 1999, p. 190–1, 218. A similar conjunction of opposites emerges from Warburg’s pages on the donor portrait in ‘Flemish Art and the Florentine Early Renaissance’ (1902): ‘the hands maintain the self-forgetful gesture of appealing for heavenly protection; but the gaze is directed, whether in reverie or in watchfulness, into the earthly distance’ (p. 297).

      14 Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, California 1988, pp. 338, 371.

      15 Bernard Groethuysen, Origines de l’esprit bourgeois en France. I: L’Eglise et la Bourgeoisie, Paris 1927, p. vii.

      16 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘ Begriffgeschichte and Social History’, in his Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, New York 2004 (1979), p. 86.

      17 Wallerstein, ‘Bourgeois(ie) as Concept and Reality’, pp. 91–2. Behind Wallerstein’s double negation lies a more remote past, which was illuminated by Emile Benveniste in the chapter ‘An occupation without a name: commerce’ of the Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. Briefly put, Benveniste’s thesis is that trade—one of the earliest forms of ‘bourgeois’ activity—was ‘an occupation which, at least in the beginning, did not correspond to any of the hallowed, traditional activities’, and that, as a consequence, it could only be defined by negative terms like the Greek askholia and the Latin negotium (nec-otium, ‘the negation of otium’), or generic ones like the Greek pragma, the French affaires (‘no more than a substantivation of the expression à faire’), or the English adjective ‘busy’ (which ‘produced the abstract noun business’). See Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, Miami 1973 (1969), p. 118.

      18 The trajectory of the German Bürger—‘from (Stadt-)Bürger (burgher) around 1700 via (Staats-)Bürger (citizen) around 1800 to Bürger (bourgeois) as a non-proletarian around 1900’—is particularly striking: see Koselleck, ‘ Begriffgeschichte and Social History’, p. 82.

      19 Kocka, ‘Middle Class and Authoritarian State’, pp. 194–5.

      20 James Mill, An Essay on Government, ed. Ernest Baker, Cambridge 1937 (1824), p. 73.

      21 Richard Parkinson, On the Present Condition of the Labouring Poor in Manchester; with Hints for Improving It, London/Manchester 1841, p. 12.

      22 Mill, Essay on Government, p. 73.

      23 Henry Brougham, Opinions of Lord Brougham on Politics, Theology, Law, Science, Education, Literature, &c. &c.: As Exhibited in His Parliamentary and Legal Speeches, and Miscellaneous Writings, London 1837, pp. 314–15.

      24 ‘The vital thing in the situation of 1830–2, so it seemed to Whig ministers, was to break the radical alliance by driving a wedge between the middle and the working classes’, writes F. M. L. Thompson (The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830–1900, Harvard 1988, p. 16). This wedge placed below the middle class was compounded by the promise of an alliance above it: ‘it is of the utmost importance’, declared Lord Grey, ‘to associate the middle with the higher orders of society’; while Drohr Wahrman—who has reconstructed the long debate on the middle class with exceptional lucidity—points out that Brougham’s famous encomium also emphasized ‘political responsibility . . . rather than intransigence; loyalty to the crown, rather than to the rights of the people; value as a bulwark against revolution, rather than against encroachments on liberty’ (Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840, Cambridge 1995, pp. 308–9).

      25 Perry Anderson, ‘The Figures of Descent’ (1987), in his English Questions, London 1992, p. 145.

      26 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, Cambridge, MA, 1974 (1914–15), p. 62.

      27 Aesthetic forms as structured responses to social contradictions: given this relationship between literary and social history, I assumed that the essay ‘Serious Century’, though originally written for a literary collection, would fit quite smoothly into this book (after all, its working title had long been ‘On Bourgeois Seriousness’). But when I re-read the essay, I immediately felt (and I mean felt: irrationally, and irresistibly) that I had to cut much of the original, and reformulate the rest. The editing done, I realized that it mostly concerned three sections—all entitled ‘Parting of the Ways’ in the original version—that had outlined the wider morphospace within which the forms of bourgeois seriousness had taken shape. What I felt the need to eliminate, in other words, was the spectrum of formal variations that had been historically available; what survives is the result of the nineteenth-century selection process. In a book on bourgeois culture, this seems like a plausible choice; but it highlights the difference between literary history as history of literature—where the plurality, and even randomness, of formal options is a key aspect of the picture—and literary history as (part of the) history of society: where what matters is instead the connection between a specific form and its social function.

      28 A recent instance, from a book on the French bourgeoisie: ‘I posit here that the existence of social groups, while rooted in the material world, is shaped by language, and more specifically by narrative: in order for a group to claim a role as an actor in society and polity, it must have a story or stories about itself.’ Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850, Cambridge, MA, 2003, p. 6.

      29 Schumpeter ‘praised capitalism not because of its efficiency and rationality, but because of its dynamic character . . . Rather than gloss over the creative and unpredictable aspects of innovation, he made these into the cornerstone of his theory. Innovation is essentially a disequilibrium phenomenon—a leap into the dark.’ Jon Elster, Explaining Technical Change: A Case Study in the Philosophy of Science, Cambridge 1983, pp. 11, 112.

      30 The same bourgeois resistance to narrative emerges from Richard Helgerson’s study of Dutch Golden Age realism: a visual culture where ‘women, children, servants, peasants, craftsmen and interloping male suitors act’, whereas ‘upper class male householders . . . are’, and tend to find their form of choice in the non-narrative genre of the portrait. See ‘Soldiers and Enigmatic Girls: The Politics of Dutch Domestic Realism, 1650–1672’, Representations 58 (1997), p. 55.

      31 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York 1975 (1942), pp. 137, 128. In a similar vein, Weber evoked Carlyle’s definition of the age of Cromwell as ‘the last of our heroisms’ (Weber, Protestant Ethic, p. 37).

      32 On the relationship between adventure-mentality and the capitalist spirit, see Michael Nerlich, The Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750, Minnesota 1987 (1977), and the first two sections of the next chapter.

      33 Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, New York/London 2005 (1855), p. 60.

      34 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, Harmondsworth 1990 (1867), pp. 739, 742.

      35 On Mann and the bourgeoisie, besides Lukács’s numerous essays, see Alberto Asor Rosa’s ‘Thomas Mann o dell’ambiguità borghese’, Contropiano 2: 68 and 3: 68. If there is one specific moment when the idea of a book on the bourgeois first crossed my mind, it was over forty years ago, reading Asor’s essays; the book was then begun in earnest in 1999–2000, during a year at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.

      36 Koselleck, ‘ Begriffgeschichte and Social History’, p. 86.

      37 Ibid., p. 78.

      38 Groethuysen, Origines I, p. xi.

      39 Emile Benveniste, ‘Remarks on the Function of Language in Freudian Theory’, in Problems in General Linguistics, Oxford, OH, 1971 (1966), p. 71 (emphasis added).

      40 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Harmondsworth 1998 (1872), p. 186.

      41

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