made locally. But this shift in production sites also raised the question of how the people remaining behind would find work, and in particular the young people coming out of a rapidly expanding university system, a majority of whom came from the upper or middle bourgeoisie.
This is the context in which the shaping of an enrichment economy has to be interpreted. The process consisted in putting previously marginal forms of wealth creation at the heart of economic activity, which had long been dominated by manufacturing. Economies based on tourism or luxury goods already existed, but they had far less importance than they were to acquire later on, chiefly because their principal customers were less numerous and more locally rooted. But the wealthy and ultra-wealthy individuals who had benefited from the financial, industrial, and digital economies, as well as from the lowered costs of travel, were increasing considerably in number and becoming much more mobile. The development of an enrichment economy stimulated exports, which included more and more high-end goods. But it also enabled the highlighting and exploitation of resources that either could not be moved (such as landscapes and monuments) or were difficult to transport. These factors led to a doubling of the objects offered for consumption (this was particularly clear, as we have seen, in the case of food products): things manufactured in low-wage countries, intended for low-income households, were sold at relatively low prices, while things intended for the wealthy, identified with reference to their local and historical origins (which protected them from competition by conferring on them a specificity with monopolistic effects), could be offered for sale at high prices.
The intensification of trade in these exceptional goods also benefited from a change that constituted one possible exit, and perhaps the main one (though Giovanni Arrighi deems it temporary), from the crisis capitalism was undergoing, which has been labeled the “financialization of the economy.”70 This phenomenon, triggered by a repatriation of capital toward its most liquid forms in response to the lowered profitability of productive investments, including on the part of non-financial enterprises, was amplified when the system of fixed exchange rates was ended in 1973, a move that stimulated speculation on currencies and the creation of new financial products intended to play the role of insurance in order to diminish the uncertainty of derivative contracts, which had themselves rapidly become speculative instruments. The growing role given to financial activities almost certainly benefited the development of an enrichment economy, in two different ways. First, by increasing inequality. Financial gains are concentrated at the top, in private fortunes. Much more than is the case with industrial profits, these gains favor the wealthiest to the detriment of the middle classes, not to mention the mass of workers excluded from the profits drawn from this type of trade.71 Indeed, ultra-rich individuals constitute the most sought-after clients in an enrichment economy, the most interesting in pecuniary terms, especially in the real-estate sector. Second, by increasing the level of uncertainty of returns on speculative investments. The sometimes gigantic sums that have fallen into the hands of the lucky agents of successful financial operators have presumably72 been used, at least in part, for the acquisition of goods of high patrimonial value, such as exceptional homes, antiques, or works of ancient or contemporary art, rather than being reinvested on the financial markets in new operations whose outcome would be more or less uncertain. Rather than being investments destined to bring in profits, these acquisitions thus have played the role of permanent placements that shelter capital by investing it in goods that are very likely to maintain their prices over time at a high level, even while remaining relatively liquid, in the sense that the investor could plausibly hope to sell them eventually, even in the worst of cases, without loss.
Partisans of things 73
In the effort to understand the formation of an enrichment economy, we must go beyond a sociology or ethnology of the rich,74 of their way of life, their patterns of consumption,75 their tastes, their preference for luxury goods, and more generally everything in their behavior and approach to life that is rooted in a quest for distinction so as to maintain the gap that separates them from the other social classes.76 As useful as it may be, such an approach often tends to take an atemporal turn, if only insofar as one can bring to light traits that characterize the dominant classes, whatever the period or even the culture considered. What is required for our purposes is a dynamic analysis of the relation between different ways of generating wealth. This detour constitutes a necessary preliminary to an understanding of the changes over the last few decades that have affected not only the dominant classes – for which the term “bourgeoisie,” inherited from the nineteenth century,77 hardly suffices to evoke the most contemporary features – but also the overall divisions of society.
For, as has been demonstrated by an overabundant historiography focused on the decline of agrarian feudalism and the formation of industrial societies, while the defining features of social divisions clearly depend in part on their anchoring in specific political configurations, these divisions are fundamentally based on the way wealth is generated. This is why we have begun not with the study of people, and particularly the wealthiest (the top 10 percent), for whom the objects we have mentioned as examples seemed to be chiefly intended – the analysis of their tastes, their conspicuous consumption, or the role played in the exercise of their domination by the symbolic markers that surround them – but with the objects themselves and the way they have been invested with their particular value – that is, with the processes through which they acquire the status of wealth. We shall thus focus primarily on the processes through which things possessed, things that count as heritage objects, are transformed into capital, in the sense that they are integrated, through exchange, into a process of circulation that aims at accumulation and profit.78
Considered in terms of the formation of a specific sphere of wealth creation, the development of an enrichment economy is manifested as much by the intensification of the relations woven among these sectors as by the growth in each of the sectors we have mentioned, taken separately. Thus, for example, the development of trade in luxury goods maintains close ties, on the one hand, with an increase in public attention to cultural and artistic activities, considered in their conjoined aesthetic and commercial dimensions, and, on the other, with the growth of tourism and heritage creation, two processes that mutually stimulate each other. The multiplication of such links seems to us to be the most striking phenomenon, for it attests to the orientation of contemporary capitalism toward a systematic exploitation of wealth relying on the exploitation of “tradition” and, more generally, of the past.
This change tends not only to affect the structure of society in certain ways that may be deemed local or sectorial but also to modify the cognitive operators on which actors rely to form a representation of social space and to orient themselves within it. Some three decades ago, given the gradual disappearance of the French peasantry, these cognitive operators were still centered largely around positions of managers and engineers, workers and employees, which constituted its poles of attraction, or, one might say, its attractors – that is, they were centered around activities connected to varying degrees with productive work, dependent either on private firms or on organizations linked to a central government. Lately, these operators seem to have reorganized themselves around business, as attested for example by the proliferation of business schools.79 But, if we go deeper into the details, we can see that this change in orientation has tended also to modify the nature of the activities that played the role of attractor, at least on a symbolic level, partly because the role of these activities was increasingly important but also doubtless because they were subjected to an intense work of representation. Thus we find in the position of attractor, on one side, the fuzzy notion of creator and, on the other, a category of increasing importance in ordinary social taxonomies whose label is essentially pejorative: in French, the category bobo, which can be associated with the English “hipster.”80 The success of these terms is probably connected to the fact that this category emphasized a new social configuration, bringing together within the same persons traits that had been viewed as socially antagonistic, some having to do with commerce and others with intellectual and cultural life. This is why the extension of bobo is extremely variable and its definition extremely fuzzy, allowing it to
