Bourgeois

“ The bourgeois society grew out of the corporative and feudal society and it grew out of it through struggle and revolution in order to take possession of the instruments and means of production which all culminate in the formation, the development and the multiplication of capital. ”

“ And the tradespeople, the bourgeoisie—your dressmaker, your milliner, your tailor, your butcher and baker and candlestick-maker—skilled and suave and generally charming—O heaven and earth! how they do lie! Not occasionally, not when hard-pressed, not when truth will not do as well, but persistently, calmly, eternally. ”

“ But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonism, on the exploitation of the many by the few. ”

“ The class which gave the Revolution its chiefs, its outward and visible forms, and the irresistible energy of its hopes, was the bourgeoisie, intelligent, ambitious and rich; in the forefront the capitalists and financiers of the haute bourgeoisie, farmers-general and army contractors, The bourgeoisie—the incarnation of new ideas. ”

“ Hence forms of social production that preceded the bourgeois form, are treated by the bourgeoisie in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions. ”

“ B. The mass of the bourgeoisie:, that is, the capitalists, and those landholders who have the industrial, bourgeois ideology.
C. Small entrepreneurs, small and middle-class proprietors, small and more or less well-to-do peasants, petite bourgeoisie, as well as those workers who have submitted to a bourgeois point of view. ”

“ Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. ”

“ Same as Burgh, Borough.
Bourgeois, bur-jois′, n. a kind of printing type, larger than brevier and smaller than longprimer. [Fr.—perh. from the name of the typefounder.]
Bourgeoisie, bōōrzh′waw-zē, n. the middle class of citizens, esp. traders. [From Fr. bourgeois, a citizen, often taken as a typical word for the mercantile middle class—used also adjectively, like such in manners or ways of thinking.] ”

“ There was a bourgeois aristocracy with a taste for work and the higher culture, but narrow and pietistic, who were calmly convinced of their own superiority and the superiority of their city, and quite content to live in family isolation. ”

“ Well, in our heart of hearts we’re bourgeois, we’re desperately bourgeois. But I suspect it’s just the same with others as it is with us. In the last fifty years so many tinkers, tailors, and spectacle-makers have pitchforked themselves into the upper classes ”

“ The question then is where the people begins and where it ends, for each day competencies shift, ruin lowers one, and fortune raises another; roles change, he who was a bourgeois this morning is going to become again a proletarian this evening, and the proletarian of just now, may turn into a bourgeois in a day, if he finds a purse, or inherits from an uncle. ”

“ From the mouths of the bourgeois themselves come complaints of that moral and intellectual decay of the elite of the English laborers which they share with the bourgeoisie itself and to-day indeed they are scarcely more than little bourgeois and are distinguished from them only by a somewhat greater lack of culture. ”

“ Nowhere were the mercantile and trading classes comparatively more wealthy and intellectual, yet nowhere was the distinction between the noble and the plebeian or bourgeois more rigorously maintained. ”

“ There's only one thing that warms my heart, and that is the thought that we are going to sweep away these bourgeois." ”

“ To this class belong therefore the working men, the lower grade of citizens, handicraftsmen, and generally speaking the peasants. The second class consists of those who dispose of large private property, of a large capital, and by reason of such a basis of capital, engage in production, or draw an income in the shape of rents. These may be called the rich citizens. But a rich citizen, gentlemen, is for that reason essentially no Bourgeois at all. ”

“ The aristocratic and the bourgeois virtues—that is to say the destructive and pecuniary traits—should be found chiefly among the upper classes, and the industrial virtues—that is to say the peaceable traits—chiefly among the classes given to mechanical industry. ”

“ The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. ”

“ Petty Bourgeois Socialism.
The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The medieval burgesses and the small peasant bourgeoisie, were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie. ”

“ In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. ”

“ At one or another stage in the life cycle of every civilization aggressive bourgeois greed for wealth and power makes itself felt. Their role in western civilization has been outstanding. The business class through its control of the productive apparatus and the sources of credit has been able to surround itself with subordinates, scientists and other experts, apologists, strong-arm squads (police and military) , spies and assassins. II. A middle class, made up of business class subordinates plus self employed tradesmen, professionals, independent farmers and craftsmen. ”

“ Now, it is the bourgeoisie are uppermost. Trade and money-getting, railroads and mines, have seized hold of the nation’s heart; and where the bâton of a Maréchal was once the most coveted of all earthly distinctions, a good bargain on the Bourse, or a successful transaction in scrip, are now the highest triumphs. ”

“ If I had any predilection for homiletical discourse, Gentlemen, I should be quite justified in saying that I have exhorted the working classes to a filial piety toward the bourgeoisie, in that I have shown that the dominance of the bourgeoisie was the indispensable prerequisite and condition by transition out of which alone the idea of the working class could come forth. ”

“ Next below this is a numerous body of the Middle Classes (bourgeoisie) , consisting of two distinct sets; the one, the active class, is engaged in commerce, manufactures, agriculture, and the liberal professions; the other, generally designated amongst us as the bourgeoisie oisive, consists of men without active employment, landholders who derive an income of 500 or 1500 dollars from their estates, by rents or sharing the produce with the cultivator, without attempting to increase it, and the small body of holders of public stock. ”

“ Classical political economy nearly touches the true relation of things, without, however, consciously formulating it. This it cannot so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin. ”

“ The powerful organisation of the bourgeois class enables them to retain private property. The rich are few in number, but they are surrounded by a large number of faithful, devoted and handsomely-paid servants: ministers, directors of works, directors of banks, and so on ”

“ All the terror of the bourgeoisie now became apparent, for assuredly the ancient and holy principle of property was in sore distress if the sons of the hard-fisted peasants of former times had reached such a point as to place their strips of land in common. ”

“ The lower middle-classes, the small manufacturers, the shop keepers, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle-class ... ”

“ Socially, the influence of nobles and clergy steadily declined. As steadily arose the numbers, the ability, and the importance of the traders and commercial magnates, the moneyed people, all those who were identified with the new wealth that the Commercial Revolution was creating, the lawyers, the doctors, the professors, the merchants,—the so-called middle class, the bourgeoisie, who gradually grew discontented with the restrictive institutions of their time. ”

“ The bourgeoisie is here conceived as a revolutionary class -- as the bearer of large-scale industry -- relative to the feudal lords and the lower middle class, who desire to maintain all social positions that are the creation of obsolete modes of production. ”

“ The central theme is the rise and evolution of the powerful middle class in society—the bourgeoisie—which has done more than all the other social classes put together to create the life and thought of the modern world. There are accordingly such excellent chapters as those on the Commercial revolution of the sixteenth century, Society in the eighteenth century, The industrial revolution, and Social factors, 1870-1914. ”

“ Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. ”

“ On the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects. ”

“ He was, moreover, an important member of the bourgeoisie,—a leader among the small proprietors, all of them envious, jealous, delighted to catch up and retail gossip and calumnies against the aristocracy; dragging things down to their own level ”

“ Here, on the contrary, a few fools excepted, the seigneurs, almost all of whom have risen from the bourgeoisie, cultivate their lands in common friendship with their tenants, or equip vessels for commerce. And so we see here universal prosperity and affluence in our smiling country. ”

“ To ameliorate and raise the standard of the workingmen to the bourgeois level, is perhaps to create a race of slaves content with their lot,—a cast of comfortable Pariahs. ”

“ She had liked him for himself, that was indisputable. And yet, much as she had liked him she had liked the bourgeois standard of valuation more. ”

“ Our revolution is a bourgeois revolution, the workers must support the bourgeoisie—say the worthless politicians from the camp of the liquidators. Our revolution is a bourgeois revolution, say we who are Marxists. ”

“ To appreciate the demoralizing effects of an income obtained without labor and without trouble on men of small culture, we need only witness the bourgeoisie at great watering places, pilgrimage places, seats of courts and university cities supported largely by students. ”

“ And in proportion as we carry our observations above the classes which so happily preserve their primitive characteristics, to the bourgeoisie, or into regions higher still, so shall we find the growth and development of vice ”

“ The war, more than anything else, has served to open the eyes of the workers, to tear the false veil from bourgeois democracy, and to reveal to the people the whole abyss of war-time speculation and profiteering. In the name of freedom and equality the bourgeoisie has conducted this war; in the name of freedom and equality the purveyors of war-munitions have become incredibly rich. ”

“ He does not notice that bourgeois democracy suppresses and oppresses the laboring and exploited masses, and that in its turn, proletarian democracy will have to suppress the bourgeoisie. Kautsky and Vandervelde Vandervelde are completely blind on this subject, for the class interest of the bourgeoisie, in the wake of which these petty bourgeois traitors are floundering, demands that this question should be avoided or passed over in silence, or that the necessity of such suppression be directly denied. ”

“ Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer. ”

“ There was no lack of examples lying near to his hand, The bourgeoisie had taken unto itself many a piece of aristocrat and church property—why should not he now do the same with bourgeois property? The sansculotte had at that time to pass through many hard, albeit many merry days. Often he had to endure hunger in the most literal sense of the term, and hunger, as is well known, is a bad counselor. Thereupon our has-nothing begins to exhibit a great nonchalance toward bourgeois property. The bourgeoisie resists that as well as it knows how. ”

“ In explaining the class-nature of bourgeois civilization, of bourgeois parliamentarism, all Socialists have uttered the thought set forth with the utmost scientific exactness by Marx and Engels: that the most democratic bourgeois republic is nothing but a machine for the oppression of the laboring class by the bourgeoisie, of the mass of workers by a handful of capitalists. ”

“ Millions of copies of bourgeois papers, which were raising all sorts of howls against the Bolsheviks, helped to draw the masses into a study of Bolshevism; and, apart from the newspapers, the whole public, precisely because of the zeal of the bourgeoisie, was taken up with discussions about Bolshevism. At present, the millionaires of all countries are behaving, on an international scale, in such a manner as to deserve our heartiest thanks. ”