Schriften, Tübingen 1971, p. 20.
2 Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The Bourgeois(ie) as Concept and Reality’, New Left Review I/167 (January–February 1988), p. 98.
3 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States, London 1992, p. 3; the second passage is from The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, London 2002 (1999), p. 63.
4 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York 1958 (1905), p. 24 (emphasis added).
5 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914, New York 1989 (1987), p. 177.
6 Perry Anderson, ‘The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution’ (1976), in English Questions, London 1992, p. 122.
7 Jürgen Kocka, ‘Middle Class and Authoritarian State: Toward a History of the German Bürgertum in the Nineteenth Century’, in his Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society. Business, Labor, and Bureaucracy in Modern Germany, New York/Oxford 1999, p. 193.
8 Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, p. 172.
9 Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. V. Pleasure Wars, New York 1999 (1998), pp. 237–8.
10 Peter Gay, Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815–1914, New York 2002, p. 5.
11 Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. I. Education of the Senses, Oxford 1984, p. 26.
12 Ibid., pp. 45ff.
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,
