Bourgeoisie and Middle Classes, History of

Abstract

The history of the bourgeoisie and the middle classes concerns the development and the transformation of social formations that are made up of those occupying intermediary social positions. These social formations and their members take on mediating or leading functions in society, economics, politics, and culture. The historiography of the bourgeoisie and middle classes takes as its point of departure the development of the modern bourgeoisie out of the older urban bourgeoisie (burghers) of Europe. It concentrates on Western and Central Europe and on the USA, the history of which has, from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, been shaped to a large degree by the bourgeoisie and the middle classes. It asks how the functions and meaning of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘middle classes’ have changed in these core areas, how, since the late nineteenth century, the conception has diffused to the periphery of Europe and worldwide, and how, in the process, it has transformed and run up against certain limits. Finally, it analyses the attempts to eliminate or transform the bourgeoisie in socialist countries, and the reconstruction of modern middle classes in postsocialist societies. Historical and systematic concepts of the exclusive bourgeoisie and the inclusive middle classes are preoccupied with the central region of the society in question, that is with that which takes shape between the extremities. The fundamental assumption is that society is not formed and integrated ‘from above’ (aristocracy, upper class, oligarchy), ‘from below’ (working class, the propertyless, the uneducated), or ‘from outside’ (foreign domination).