The Transformation of the World (164 page)

The educated, competent, and (in theory if not always in practice) public-spirited scholar-officials of the high imperial period soon became in reality, as well as in the perception of society, a seedy, parasitic landlord class, while at the same time (or, to be more precise, after the beginning of the New Culture Movement in 1915) the newly emerging intelligentsia in the big cities vehemently opposed the whole worldview that the mandarinate had embodied and represented. Deserted by the state, combated and treated with contempt by politicized intellectuals, locked in a structural conflict with the peasantry, the old upper stratum of Imperial China became one of the most vulnerable elements in Chinese society. The samurai path of salvation through self-effacement was no longer available to it. Those whom Chinese Marxists vilified from the 1920s on as the “landlord class” had neither the material means to defend themselves nor the vision of a national future for which allies might have been found. Further debilitated after 1937 by the Second Sino-Japanese War, the old rural upper class of China no longer had any way of resisting the Communist peasant revolution of the late 1940s.

The Chinese
shenshi
were not a warrior aristocracy in the European or Japanese sense. Merit, not birth, was the criterion by which they were recruited. Nor did elite positions last such a long time: the cycle of rise and fall for individual families often spanned only a few generations. The continuity of the elite was secured not through genealogy but through the strength of government-related institutions constantly drawing on fresh talent. Nevertheless, the
shenshi
resembled a classical aristocracy in their proximity to the ruler, their role in supporting the state, and an agonistic conception of the world geared not to physical competition in war and hunting but to intellectual rivalry in mastering the inherited educational canon. Two further common elements were control of land and a detachment from physical labor. All in all, the similarities outweigh the differences. The
shenshi
were in many ways a functional equivalent of a European nobility, and they too got off fairly lightly during the chronological nineteenth century. After the Taiping threat
subsided in 1864, the direct competition they faced in society was comparatively weak; the challenge of a nascent “bourgeoisie” to
shenshi
hegemony was on a much lesser scale than anything seen in analogous situations in Europe. In China, the threat came mainly from peasant revolts and
foreign
capitalism. The terminal point was 1905, which was for the
shenshi
what the 1790s represented for the French aristocracy, 1873 for the samurai, or 1919 for the nobility in Germany. The
shenshi
, too, were a land-based elite in decline, the largest anywhere in the world.

The fate of aristocratic and quasi-aristocratic elites was partly homespun, partly influenced by wider developments. Here there were two opposing trends. On the one hand, it turned out that the radiance and attractiveness of aristocratic ideals was wearing thin. Societies took shape in America and Australia that were, in a historically novel sense, immune from and toward nobility, and even the colonial empires managed to stabilize things only on a makeshift basis. In the early modern period, Europe's colonial outthrust had hugely extended the geographical sphere of operations of the European nobility, but although there was a degree of solidarity across cultures, non-European nobles seldom adopted European worldviews or role conceptions. In comparison, the cultural package offered by the European bourgeoisie was a much more attractive export item. The new colonies of the late nineteenth century did not bear an aristocratic stamp. In Africa and Southeast Asia after 1875 the European powers together spawned a new type of bourgeois functionary, and even in India feudal mummery could not disguise the bureaucratic character of the colonial state.

On the other hand, a number of general changes made themselves felt. The beginning of the end was in sight for the aristocratic “international” when the foreign offices and diplomatic services of the Great Powers ceased to recruit exclusively princes, counts, and lords. Before 1914, the foreign policy of the United States and the French Republic was already being shaped almost entirely by bourgeois politicians. State building in the nineteenth century led nearly everywhere to a greater distance between the central institutions of government and a nobility struggling to control its own local power resources. If the state employed aristocrats, these were no more than its “servants” either. At the same time, the nobility had less access to its old agrarian sources of income, power, and prestige: all manner of peasant emancipation, together with the whittling down of local privileges and the decline of agricultural income in an age of industrial development and world economic expansion, restricted the traditional opportunities that had enabled the aristocratic classes to flourish. The nobility kept control of its destiny, even in the early twentieth century, mainly where it saw itself as part of a broader elite no more than weakly defined by inherited status, where it reined in its habitual conceit and where it pragmatically forged new social and political alliances.

3 Bourgeois and Quasi-bourgeois

Phenomenology of the Bourgeois

The nineteenth century was the century of the bourgeoisie, at least in Europe.
⁵³
A social space marked by its distinctive values and lifestyles opened up in the cities—between a declining nobility that made offers of class compromise among the prosperous layers of society, on the one side, and a class of wage laborers that, by the last third of the nineteenth century, had evolved from a plebs into a proletariat and achieved a degree of political self-organization and cultural independence, on the other. The mansion suburbs that sprang up in many European cities during the last two decades before the First World War are visible relics of this bygone world of a bourgeoisie eager to put its hallmark features on display. Who was a bourgeois and what it meant to be one cannot be reliably defined by objective criteria of family origin, income level, and profession.
⁵⁴
People were bourgeois—such is the near-tautological conclusion of extensive research and discussion—if they
considered
themselves bourgeois and gave this belief practical expression in the way they led their life. Radical skeptics have called into question the whole construct of “the bourgeoisie.” We can doubtless identify individual bourgeois and whole generational chains of bourgeois families, both in literary fiction (Thomas Mann's
Buddenbrooks
, 1901) and in historical reality.
⁵⁵
But, it is argued, the bourgeoisie as a social stratum or class escapes definition. Was it not simply a myth?
⁵⁶

It is easier to define a bourgeois negatively: he is not a feudal lord deriving his conception of himself from landownership plus genealogy, and not a manual worker in dependent employment. Otherwise, the category seems broader than any other classificatory social construct. If we think of the period around 1900, for example, it encompasses some of the richest people in the world—industrialists, bankers, shipowners, railroad magnates—and also professors and judges earning an adequate but not lavish salary, members of the liberal professions with an academic qualification (e.g., doctors and lawyers),
⁵⁷
as well as storekeepers, master artisans, and policemen. Around 1900 the new “whitecollar” employee was also becoming more visible: a subordinate figure on the margin of bourgeois life, but one who attached great value to the fact that by working at a cash desk in a bank or the accounts department of an industrial enterprise, he did not have to get his hands dirty. Now that a growing number of large firms were run by managers rather than their owners, there was even a layer of “executive” employees who looked upper middle class and had wide scope for independent initiative, apparently on a par with the most zealous guardians of bourgeois values.

So, one reason why the concept of a bourgeoisie is so misleading is that it breaks up so quickly into individual life paths. The bourgeois strives to rise in society and is afraid of nothing as much as the opposite: a fall into the ranks of
the poor and despised. A ruined aristocrat is always still an aristocrat; a ruined bourgeois no more than a déclassé.
⁵⁸
The successful bourgeois owes his position to self-reliance and achievement; nothing inborn seems to him dependable. Society in his eyes is a ladder: he is somewhere in the middle, constantly under pressure to move upward. Ambition is not just a matter of personal ascent, family prosperity, and a perception of direct class interest. The bourgeois wants to shape and organize things; he has a lofty conception of his responsibility and, by making his own life, wishes to play a role in giving a direction to society.
⁵⁹
In the most rapacious bourgeois there is still a spark of the public-spirited
citoyen
. Bourgeois culture, more than any other nonreligious system of values, raises a claim to universality and thus contains an urge to move beyond its original social bearers. The bourgeois always has many beneath him toward whom he cultivates an attitude of superiority, and as a rule he has at least a few above him. So long as there are nonbourgeois elites—a nobility or a prestigious clergy (such as the Muslim
ulama
)—even the wealthiest bourgeois does not stand at the top of the social hierarchy. Only in a few societies were things otherwise in the nineteenth century: for example, Switzerland, the Netherlands, post-1870 France, or the East Coast of the United States. The most “bourgeois” society is one in which bourgeois players in
every
sphere of life themselves set the rules for their competition with one another. This tended to become the norm in the twentieth century; it was the exception worldwide in the nineteenth.

But the twentieth century also witnessed the long fall of the bourgeoisie as a class, a radical de-bourgeoisification and de-feudalization of whole societies. The drama began to be acted out in 1917 in Russia and was soon repeated in central Europe and (after 1949) in China. The twentieth-century revolutions lumped the bourgeoisie and residual aristocracy together. In nineteenth-century Europe, however, it was often difficult—though never really life threatening—to be a bourgeois. Before 1917, the European bourgeoisie as a social group never suffered the fate that befell sections of the French aristocracy after 1789. The Bolshevik Revolution destroyed ways of life opposed to it much more radically than any previous revolution had been able to do. The world of the Russian economic bourgeoisie, which came into being only after 1861 and had had only five decades to develop, looked like a sunken civilization in the optic of the late 1920s.
⁶⁰
And until the great postwar inflation in Germany and Austria (the harshest blow yet to the classical bourgeoisie in Europe) and the subsequent onset of the Great Depression in 1929, large parts of the bourgeoisie had never been collectively deprived of the supports for its claim to a “refined” standard of living. The nineteenth century was quite a good time to be a bourgeois too.

Petit Bourgeois

How large was the bourgeoisie? The terminological proximity between the bourgeoisie proper and the petite bourgeoisie of storekeepers and independent artisans still causes confusion. What did a steel magnate and a chimney sweeper
have in common? The differences were much more obvious. The social characteristics of “large” and “small” bourgeois are at first sight easy to distinguish; the two groups evolved along different tracks. Thus, in many European countries in the second half of the nineteenth century, the mentality and politics of the educated property-owning bourgeoisie differed considerably from those of a petite bourgeoisie anxious to distance itself from industrial workers. France actually became a nation of petit bourgeois, while in Russia, quite short of small and medium-sized cities, the new stratum of capitalist pioneers and educated dignitaries could support itself on only a thin cushion of petit bourgeois.

The petite bourgeoisie is conceptually hard to grasp. The term “middleclass,” preferred in Britain and the United States (although its first appearance in an American dictionary was only in 1889
⁶¹
), does not satisfy everyone as a solution to the problem, since its unity and homogeneity are not easy to demonstrate even for the United States, where the bourgeois consensus was from the beginning broader than in Europe. Theorists have made a more persistent effort (though without generalizable results) to identify the social membrane between lower middle class and upper middle class, and they have rarely been able to avoid drawing internal dividing lines: in the English case, for example, between a capitalist middle class and a noncapitalist or professional middle class, roughly (but only roughly) corresponding to the German
Wirtschaftsbürgertum
and
Bildungsbürgertum
.
⁶²
“Middle class” or “middle stratum” is poorer in cultural content than “bourgeoisie,” and so it can be used in a larger number of contexts and is better suited for a global social history. Not every member of a middle stratum carries around a complete bourgeois value system.

A particularly useful distinction is the one between different milieux, each with its sphere of sociability and shared beliefs. Thus, Hartmut Kaelble proposes to distinguish between a bourgeois milieu in the narrow sense (the “upper middle class”) and a petit bourgeois milieu.
⁶³
These milieux are not precisely circumscribed groups but social fields with fuzzy boundaries, which may overlap and influence one another. Milieux may also be thought of more specifically as arenas of local life. The first to take shape are based on friendship, marriage, and clubs or associations, their composition and subculture varying from place to place;
then
perhaps come translocal strata and classes.

“Petite bourgeoisie” has yet to be developed as a theme in
global
social history. This is unsurprising in the case of the nineteenth century: the lives in question were local to a quite exceptional degree,
⁶⁴
and their economic radius of action seldom stretched beyond a neighborhood of people in constant contact with one another. Shopkeepers knew their customers by name. After a youthful period of travel and companionship, the subject of so much Romantic verse, the typical petit bourgeois rarely went outside the boundaries of their locality. The culture, too, was limited in reach. The petite bourgeoisie, in particular, was not an international stratum (although there was a first world congress of
petits bourgeois
in 1899!): it was less mobile than migrant underclasses; and it had few cross-border
links in comparison with the far-flung families of the aristocracy or the business connections of the upper bourgeoisie. For this reason, the very term “petit bourgeois” is hard to transfer from one context to another. What is to be gained from using it to describe a silversmith in Isfahan or the owner of a teahouse in Hankou? Similarly, some of its pejorative connotations have little purchase outside the cultural or political circles in which they originally developed.