contempt, but also of respect from below. The migrant labourer or soldier saw the established bourgeois as his opposite; workers saw the capitalized bourgeois as an employer. The social dimension of the later use was thus fully established by lC18, although the essentially different aristocratic or philosophical contempt was still an active sense.
The definition of bourgeois society was a central concept in Marx, yet especially in some of his early work the term is ambiguous, since in relation to Hegel for whom civil (bürgerlich) society was an important term to be distinguished from STATE (q.v.) Marx used, and in the end amalgamated, the earlier and the later meanings. Marx’s new sense of bourgeois society followed earlier historical usage, from established and solvent burgesses to a growing class of traders, entrepreneurs and employers. His attack on what he called bourgeois political theory (the theory of civil society) was based on what he saw as its falsely universal concepts and institutions, which were in fact the concepts and institutions of a specifically bourgeois society: that is, a society in which the bourgeoisie (the class name was now much more significant) had become or was becoming dominant. Different stages of bourgeois society led to different stages of the CAPITALIST (q.v.) mode of economic production, or, as it was later more strictly put, different stages of the capitalist mode of production led to different stages of bourgeois society and hence bourgeois thought, bourgeois feeling, bourgeois ideology, bourgeois art. In Marx’s sense the word has passed into universal usage. But it is often difficult to separate it, in some respects, from the residual aristocratic and philosophical contempt, and from a later form especially common among unestablished artists, writers and thinkers, who might not and often do not share Marx’s central definition, but who sustain the older sense of hostility towards the (mediocre) established and respectable.
The complexity of the word is then evident. There is a problem even in the strict Marxist usage, in that the same word, bourgeois, is used to describe historically distinct periods and phases of social and cultural development. In some contexts, especially, this is bound to be confusing: the bourgeois ideology of settled independent citizens is clearly not the same as the bourgeois ideology of the highly mobile agents of a para-national corporation. The distinction of petit-bourgeois is an attempt to preserve some of the earlier historical characteristics, but is also used for a specific category within a more complex and mobile society. There are also problems in the relation between bourgeois and capitalist, which are often used indistinguishably but which in Marx are primarily distinguishable as social and economic terms. There is a specific difficulty in the description of non-urban capitalists (e.g. agrarian capitalist employers) as bourgeois, with its residual urban sense, though the social relations they institute are clearly bourgeois in the developed C19 sense. There is also difficulty in the relation between descriptions of bourgeois society and the bourgeois or bourgeoisie as a class. A bourgeois society, according to Marx, is one in which the bourgeois class is dominant, but there can then be difficulties of usage, associated with some of the most intense controversies of analysis, when the same word is used for a whole society in which one class is dominant (but in which, necessarily, there are other classes) and for a specific class within that whole society. The difficulty is especially noticeable in uses of bourgeois as an adjective describing some practice which is not itself defined by the manifest social and economic content of bourgeois.
It is thus not surprising that there is resistance to the use of the word in English, but it has also to be said that for its precise uses in Marxist and other historical and political argument there is no real English alternative. The translation middle-class serves most of the pre-C19 meanings, in pointing to the same kinds of people, and their ways of life and opinions, as were then indicated by bourgeois, and had been indicated by citizen and cit and civil; general uses of citizen and cit were common until lC18 but less common after the emergence of middle-class in lC18. But middle-class (see CLASS), though a modern term, is based on an older threefold division of society – upper, middle and lower – which has most significance in feudal and immediately post-feudal society and which, in the sense of the later uses, would have little or no relevance as a description of a developed or fully formed bourgeois society. A ruling class, which is the socialist sense of bourgeois in the context of historical description of a developed capitalist society, is not easily or clearly represented by the essentially different middle class. For this reason, especially in this context and in spite of the difficulties, bourgeois will continue to have to be used.
See CAPITALISM, CIVILIZATION, CLASS, SOCIETY
Bureaucracy appears in English from mC19. Carlyle in Latter-day Pamphlets (1850) wrote of ‘the Continental nuisance called “Bureaucracy”’, and Mill in 1848 wrote of the inexpediency of concentrating all the power of organized action ‘in a dominant bureaucracy’. In 1818, using an earlier form, Lady Morgan had written of the ‘Bureaucratie or office tyranny, by which Ireland had been so long governed’. The word was taken from fw bureaucratie, F, rw bureau – writing-desk and then office. The original meaning of bureau was the baize used to cover desks. The English use of bureau as office dates from eC18; it became more common in American use, especially with reference to foreign branches, the French influence being predominant. The increasing scale of commercial organization, with a corresponding increase in government intervention and legal controls, and with the increasing importance of organized and professional central government, produced the political facts to which the new term pointed. But there was then considerable variation in their evaluation. In English and North American usage the foreign term, bureaucracy, was used to indicate the rigidity or excessive power of public administration, while such terms as public service or civil service were used to indicate impartiality and selfless professionalism. In German Bureaukratie often had the more favourable meaning, as in Schmoller (‘the only neutral element’, apart from the monarchy, ‘in the class war’), and was given a further sense of legally established rationality by Weber. The variation of terms can still confuse the variations of evaluation, and indeed the distinctions between often diverse political systems which ‘a body of public servants’ or a bureaucracy can serve. Beyond this, however, there has been a more general use of bureaucracy to indicate, unfavourably, not merely the class of officials but certain types of centralized social order, of a modern organized kind, as distinct not only from older aristocratic societies but from popular DEMOCRACY (q.v.). This has been important in socialist thought, where the concept of the ‘public interest’ is especially exposed to the variation between ‘public service’ and ‘bureaucracy’.
In more local ways, bureaucracy is used to refer to the complicated formalities of official procedures, what the Daily News in 1871 described as ‘the Ministry … with all its routine of tape, wax, seals, and bureauism’. There is again an area of uncertainty between two kinds of reference, as can be seen by the coinage of more neutral phrases such as ‘business methods’ and ‘office organization’ for commercial use, bureaucracy being often reserved for similar or identical procedures in government.
See DEMOCRACY, MANAGEMENT
