The Transformation of the World (167 page)

The
Bildungsbürger
was such a rare breed that it is unnecessary to explain why the type did not flourish elsewhere; the very word
Bildung
is notoriously untranslatable. Evidently, however, ideals of a literary-philosophical education and of intellectual and spiritual maturing and perfectibility are to be found in a number of civilizations with a system of written communication. Self-perfecting of the inner world through traditionalist character formation, sometimes understood in Asia as a task of the individual and, for example, actively pursued even by nonmandarin merchants in late imperial China, was not so far removed from the European or German ideal of
Bildung
. In Japan too, the late Tokugawa period saw a similar rapprochement of values and tastes between the cultures of the samurai and commercially active city dwellers (
chōnin
).
⁹⁸
But why were there no
Bildungsbürger
in China, the most plausible candidate for them given the profound admiration of nonreligious learning in that bookish civilization?

Such a social group could not appear where the established elite already defined itself in terms of
Bildung
and held a monopoly over its institutions and forms of expression. That was indeed the case in late imperial China, where no superior conception could challenge the canonical idea of education until the end of state examinations in 1905 and of the dynasty itself in 1911. The Confucian tradition did not allow itself to be outtrumped; it could only be overthrown by a cultural revolution. After reform movements among the literati ended in failure around the turn of the century, a general offensive against China's ancient worldview began in 1915. It was conducted not by the capitalist bourgeoisie or civil servants but by iconoclastic intellectuals, including many from the fallen mandarinate, who lived off the emerging literary market or worked in one of the new educational institutions.
⁹⁹
What developed in China, then, was not a politically indifferent or quietist layer of
Bildungsbürger
but a highly politicized intelligentsia concentrated in the big cities, which later produced many leaders of the Communist Revolution. Certain affinities with the European
bohème
and its antibourgeois subculture are unmistakable.
¹⁰⁰
Yet, since the selective intellectual Westernization of China was limited by the political conditions during a time of chaos and violence, no new posttraditional world was allowed to emerge on a broad social basis. The infatuation of parts of the new Chinese middle strata with European classical music—today China is the most rapidly growing market for pianos in the world—is a recent phenomenon, unknown before the 1980s.

The second prerequisite of a
Bildungsbürgertum
was the freeing of the mind from the all-pervasiveness of religion—which in Europe was the work of the Enlightenment and its critique of religion. Only then could secular knowledge be
held in high esteem, not to speak of the glorification of education or even the elevation of art and science to the status of substitute cults and creeds in their own right. That kind of differentiation between the godly and worldly realms did not go so far in Islamic or Buddhist cultures, for example, where challenges to religious authority in matters of value orientation tended to get stuck, as did the downplaying of religious obligations in everday life in the name of “educated” lifestyles. The
Bildungsbürger
, understood as the serene exponent of a consensus on high-cultural values and taste, was something of a rarity even in the heart of Europe. In many other cultural and political contexts, there was a sharp antagonism between upholders of orthodoxy and radical intellectuals influenced by Western dissident traditions such as anarchism or socialism.

Colonial and Cosmopolitan Bourgeoisies

Western colonial bourgeoisies were surprisingly relatively weak in the nineteenth century. On the whole, colonialism contributed little to the export of European bourgeois culture, and European societies were reproduced in only fractured and fragmentary fashion in the colonies, with few exceptions such as Canada, New Zealand, and, in a special way, Australia. Distortions in the process of transfer were unavoidable because all Europeans automatically fell into the role of masters. In terms of social rank and often income, the humblest white civil servant or employee of a private company stood above the whole of the colonized population except for its princely apex, if there was one. Colonial bourgeoisies were thus distorted mirror images of bourgeois groups in the European metropolises and remained to a large extent dependent on them culturally. In only a few nonsettler colonies was there sufficient mass for a local
society
to come into being. Of course, the social profiles of particular colonies differed considerably from one another. In India, where Britons were relatively little involved in the private economic sector, bourgeois lifestyles were taken up mainly in the colonial state apparatus, only the upper levels of which were dominated by the aristocracy. Here a distinction was made between “official British” and “unofficial British,” which together constituted local mixed societies of civil servants, officers, and businessmen. After the Great Rebellion, these became increasingly compartmentalized along color lines. Family members circulated between India and Britain, and as a rule they did not become “Indianized” even over several generations, rarely shifting the main focus of their family life to India.
¹⁰¹
Europeans were not so much settlers as temporary “sojourners.” A microcosm of all this was Malaya, where the settler element was more strongly represented than elsewhere in British Asia.
¹⁰²

South Africa was a rather special case, because the discovery of gold and diamonds soon paved the way for a tiny, ultrarich plutocracy—an isolated capitalist bourgeoisie of “Randlords” such as Cecil Rhodes, Barney Barnato, and Alfred Beit—to emerge in the mining districts. Such men were not embedded in a multifarious bourgeoisie and had only weak relations with long-established bourgeois
families in the Cape. For the most part, white hierarchies in settler colonies were only indirectly linked into the mechanisms of social reproduction in the mother country; they were not mere copies of social relations back home. Normally their members sank permanent family roots in the colony, often developing a colonial spirit tinged with local chauvinism. In France's largest settler colony, Algeria, farms growing cereals and wine were quite widely spread around the end of the nineteenth century, and the resulting society of farmers and petit bourgeois
colons
of French descent felt rather distant from bourgeois strata in the large French cities. Algeria was the model of a
petit
bourgeois colony, in which, despite many forms of discrimination, a small but growing
indigenous
middle class of merchants, landowners, and state functionaries also found a place for itself.
¹⁰³

Another hallmark of bourgeois life is domesticity. It is not necessarily associated with particular forms such as the central European monogamous, two-generation family. But the basic features are plain: the domestic sphere, clearly separate from the public, is a refuge to which strangers are denied entry. For upper layers living in the lap of luxury, the dividing line between private and semipublic space runs through the house or apartment: guests are received in the lounge or dining room but have no access to the inner sanctum. It was a code practiced as much in Western European bourgeois families as in the Ottoman home. Even the functional allocation of spaces in the home is common to nineteenth-century Europe and the cities of the Ottoman Empire.
¹⁰⁴
Where emergent bourgeois groups looked to Europe, they filled their homes with Western features: tables, chairs, metal cutlery, even open fireplaces in the English style—but selectively. Japan resisted the chair, China the knife and fork. The colorless, close-fit clothing of the European bourgeoisie became the public costume of the whole “civilized” and would-be civilized world, but in their own homes people stuck to older indigenous forms. Global bourgeois culture manifested itself in sartorial uniformity, assisted by missionary notions of decent clothing in lands remote indeed from the homeground of the bourgeoisie. If there was an insistence on local touches, that itself could have a “bourgeois” sense. For example, headgear of widely varying form and material quality had always symbolized rank in the Ottoman Empire, until Sultan Mahmud II declared in 1829 that the fez should be obligatory for all state officials and subjects;
¹⁰⁵
the Oriental object, in its very sameness, acquired the significance of bourgeois
égalité
. Thus, the Tanzimat decree of 1839, making all Ottoman subjects equal regardless of the group they belonged to, had been anticipated a decade earlier on the heads of the male population.

A final aspect spanned East and West. The Atlantic had already been commercially integrated in early modern times by European and American traders, as had the Indian Ocean by Arab seafarers and merchants; the great Dutch and English trading companies, run by bourgeois patricians, had also commercially linked continents. What was new in the nineteenth century was the emergence of a
cosmopolitan
bourgeoisie. Two things may be understood by this. On the one hand, a rentier public living off faraway earnings took shape over time in the
wealthier countries of the West. The global capital market that developed after the mid-nineteenth century made it possible for bourgeois investors (and others, of course) in Europe to profit from business in other continents—whether Egyptian or Chinese government bonds, Argentine railroads, or South African gold mines.
¹⁰⁶
Cosmopolitanism in this sense lay not so much in the variety and reach of entrepreneurial activity as in their consequences: the consumption of profits, though drawn from all parts of the world, took place in the metropolises, since the beneficiaries resided in Parisian apartments and English suburban mansions. On the other hand, there was what might be called the failed utopia of bourgeois cosmopolitanism.
¹⁰⁷
An idealized vision of liberalism at its midcentury peak consisted of free trade in goods between countries and continents, unconstrained by government action or national boundaries, impelled by enterprising individuals of every religion and color. Nationalism, colonialism, and racism would put a brutal end to this vision in the last third of the century.

The cosmopolitan bourgeoisie never developed into an actual social formation with a shared consciousness. Nationalization of the different bourgeoisies prevented this, and uneven economic development around the world took away its material foundation. What remained were nationally based entrepreneurs, many of whom became true “international operators,” part adventurers, part corporate strategists (the boundaries between the two were fluid). On all continents, raw materials were exploited, mines operated under license, loans granted, and transportation connections put in place. In 1900 the British, German, North American, and even Belgian and Swiss, capitalist bourgeoisies operated on a scale that would have been unimaginable to any earlier elite. No one from a non-Western country was yet in a position to make a breakthrough at this level of early global capitalism. Even Japanese corporations (save a few shipping companies) limited their expansion before the First World War to a politically secure colonial territory and sphere of influence on the Chinese mainland.
¹⁰⁸

At various times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many societies—at a regional or even national level—arrived at a hard-to-define threshold at which a multitude of “middling sorts” (to use an eighteenth-century Anglo-American term) turned into a social formation displaying solidarity beyond one's town or part of town, congregating around institutions such as the humanitiescentered “gymnasium” in Germany, reflecting on a shared universe of values, and developing a politically articulated consciousness of itself as separate from the top and bottom in society. In France this threshold was reached in the 1820s, in the Northeast of the United States or urban Germany around the middle of the century (although the German bourgeoisie, for example, remained significantly more heterogeneous than the French).
¹⁰⁹

As an age of transition, the nineteenth century witnessed the rise, but not necessarily the triumph, of the bourgeois conception of the world and human existence. In Europe this came under challenge from the growing ranks of labor. The partial embourgeoisement of the working population did not inevitably
strengthen the bourgeoisie, and at the end of the century upwardly mobile groups of employees in some parts of Europe and the United States came dangerously close to it, though seldom gaining political independence in the manner of the workers' movement. Bourgeois culture itself acquired mass aspects, even before an entertainment industry took widespread hold after the First World War. Alongside classical high culture and the new mass culture, a third position associated with the avant-garde appeared around the turn of the century. Small circles of creators, such as the Viennese composers around Arnold Schönberg who claimed to be emancipating musical dissonance, retreated from the bourgeois public sphere and chose to launch their work at private events. Visual artists in Munich, Vienna, and Berlin proclaimed “secessions” from the aesthetic mainstream. This was an almost unavoidable reaction to the museumization and historicization of bourgeois culture, from which the artistic production of the time increasingly distanced itself. Finally, the suburbanization process fueled by railroads and the automobile undermined bourgeois sociability in the early twentieth century. The classical bourgeois is a “man about town,” not a suburbanite. As the housing sprawl robbed cities of their shape, the intensity of bourgeois communication began to slacken.

So, it was not only the shock of the First World War that ended a
belle époque
for the nobility and the upper middle classes. Tendencies to disintegration were already building up before 1914. The crisis of the European bourgeoisie in the first half of the twentieth century passed into the huge post-1950 expansion of middle-class societies, which substituted consumerism for the ideals of virtue and respectability of the “classical” bourgeoisie. This was a worldwide process, although it made itself felt unevenly. Even where the bourgeoisie had been weak in the nineteenth century, middle strata now grew markedly in size and influence. Communist rule acted as a brake, but “goulash communism” was perfectly consistent with petit bourgeois ways, and the nomenklatura parodied high bourgeois or even aristocratic precursors in such things as its passion for hunting. In Eastern Europe and China, the history of the bourgeoisie could recommence only after 1990. Some continuities then led back into the nineteenth century.