BORGHESIA. — In a broadly generic sense, the term b. designates the intermediate class between the class possessing wealth, culture, and political power for hereditary reasons and the class of the disinherited, living exclusively by manual labor; a class that acquires its own particular configuration and traditions during a rather prolonged period of social development. Its emergence is a phenomenon ordinarily occurring among all peoples whose life progresses toward civilization. Limiting ourselves to Roman society, the small landowners of the countryside, artisans, and traders who during the republican age succeeded in improving their initial positions gradually became what today would be called the b., forming a separate group (equites), endowed with wealth and culture and therefore with particular political influence, which they had won on their own initiative and which thus did not derive simply from belonging to a preconstituted group, as could happen with the patrician class (gentes).
In its specific and historical sense, however, the b. is a quintessentially modern phenomenon, whose origins go back to the last centuries of the Middle Ages, when, in the feudal societies of the various countries of Europe, a third class inserted itself between the class of the landed feudal lords and the class of the serfs, who likewise, but in a different manner, were bound to the land by hereditary ties. This class consisted predomi-
The extent and importance of the bourgeois class in the late Middle Ages are readily apparent from the literature of the period (cf., for example, the historical world of Dante’s Commedia). The 14th century in fact marks, almost everywhere in Europe, the full flourishing of the b., with the difference that in countries where sovereign authority remained intact, thanks to the formation of national states, it had a predominantly courtly character and activity; elsewhere, however, as in Italy during the age of the communes and maritime republics, where it was able to conquer political power and govern itself, it devoted itself rather to trade and banking, and organized itself into guilds of arts and crafts, eventually, with the passage of time, assuming in both cases the task of the ruling class—a task definitively fulfilled by the b. up to the contemporary period. Within the bourgeois class, especially in the second case, a further division arose between the upper and lower b.: the former represented by the most influential and capable men of culture in the government of public affairs (professionals, teachers, physicians, men of the law, etc.), by wealthy merchants and bankers, and by the most skilled and prosperous artisans, who often assumed the role of small entrepreneurs; the latter, by contrast, consisted of lower-level employees and workers.
During the Renaissance and thereafter, up to the Revolution of 1789, the b. everywhere held in its hands the development of culture and of wealth, both movable and immovable, and stood as the Third Estate alongside the privileged classes of the nobility and clergy, which remained such and still powerful thanks to the privileges they had secured and to the traditions that made them respected, despite the autonomist and individualistic tendency proper to the new class. This lasted until, having acquired a greater awareness of its own strength in the various spheres of social life, the bourgeois class abolished every subordination of itself to the privileges of others, overthrowing ancient political constitutions and tempering sovereign power through representative institutions, without even concerning itself with ecclesiastical laws and ordinances sanctioned by centuries of tradition. The wider dissemination of a distinctly secular culture and the new conceptions concerning the origin of society (the Enlightenment), and especially the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, brought the bourgeois class to absolute domination of culture and wealth (capitalism).
In the latter sphere particularly, the b. rendered great service by prodigiously accelerating the pace of economic progress during the past two centuries, through the application of the experimental sciences and technology to methods of production, the increasingly extensive introduction of machinery, and the scientific organization of labor, thanks to the spirit of initiative, courage, and tenacity with which the difficulties of the new productive processes were confronted. The utilitarian conception of the economy proper to the 19th-century b., however, obstructed a just distribution of the new wealth in favor of the working classes, which were not enabled to enjoy it to the extent in which it was produced, in accordance with natural needs and human dignity, thereby giving rise to the proletariat as a mass phenomenon. In that conception, labor was in fact regarded as a “commodity,” like the other factors of production, and was remunerated as such with low wages and exploited through the excessive length of the working day and the employment of women and children, until trade-union organizations and social legislation acquired their present effectiveness in defending workers, limiting the freedom of the productive classes in labor relations. To the same causes must be attributed, during the same period of the b.’s rise, the emergence and consolidation of industrial concentrations (private monopolies, trusts, cartels), which often exercised an oppressive tyranny over the market, suppressing competition among producers and imposing prices unilaterally, without regard for consumers’ needs.
The 19th century thus marked the apogee of the b., which established itself under the name of liberalism, dominating every sector of national life, including the political sphere, despite the establishment of democratic systems founded on universal suffrage. Yet this same triumph contained, in latent form, the seeds of the b.’s decline, which became increasingly pronounced in the contemporary period. The same motives that had determined its emergence (awareness of itself and of its social importance, and hence the aspiration to autonomy and to the conquest of power) initiated its disintegration, opening the way to the claims of the working masses, indigent and oppressed by capitalism, no longer willing to remain subject to the bourgeois class.
Marx and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communists (1848) is the rallying cry of the proletarians in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, against which the criticism and revolutions of socialism will hurl themselves with fierce and merciless force. The accusations levelled by socialist writers against the bourgeoisie, still recurring a century later, although the economic conditions of the two classes have changed considerably, come down to that of the systematic exploitation of the working class, inherent in the bourgeois mentality, and to that of unlimited individual freedom at the expense of collective interests, to which in particular the recurrence of periodic crises and the origin of privately held monopolies are attributed. Since then the bourgeoisie, as the ruling class, and liberalism with it, of which it was the advocate to an incredible degree, have been in serious crisis. In this crisis, which spread on an unprecedented scale at the end of the First World War and is still far from having been overcome, lies the entire social problem of our day. For the bourgeoisie has known how to reassert and unequivocally affirm, albeit beyond reasonable limits, the rights of the individual and the sovereignty of the law, which safeguards those rights within the established order; and therein lies its undeniable merit. On the other hand, however, it has not known how to extend recognition of the dignity of the human person to the lower strata of society, exposing them to the uncontrolled freedom of initiative and to the tyranny of the strongest. In vain did totalitarian regimes believe they could solve the problem left unresolved by the bourgeoisie, undertaking the defence of the masses and establishing a bureaucratic state centralizing all powers: the subjection of all to the authority of the state, held by a new caste of leaders (technicians and bureaucrats), dominated in turn by politicians who had succeeded in more or less legally seizing public power, replaced the effective freedom of the few who had taken the place of the ancient ruling caste.
The distinction made below between the upper and lower bourgeoisie must also be borne in mind in the contemporary period, in which the former, composed of representatives of large-scale industrial and agricultural property and of high finance, tends to be deprived of its directive role in political and economic life. The latter, which in recent times has taken the name of the middle class, contrary to the Marxist predictions of a progressive expansion of the proletariat, has instead continued to grow as a result of the general increase in wealth and its distribution according to the principles of greater social justice. This bourgeoisie consists of those who, not infrequently rising from the lower classes of society, have attained a certain degree of culture and prosperity within individual freedom (members of the liberal professions and middle-sized proprietors), or conditions of relative independence (officials and employees of public and private administration), and represents the central and most stable nucleus of modern societies. Alien both to exaggerated conservatism and to the violent and precipitous upheavals of the established order, this bourgeoisie is therefore a factor of equilibrium and constancy in the evolution of social life, in which it appears destined to have a decisive function in the future, since it is itself a mass, but one of cultivated and conscious citizens, in whom the other two extreme and opposing tendencies are appropriately neutralized and the most suitable and disinterested leaders are prepared for the pursuit of the public good.
Alberto De Marco