Bourgeois Culture

This phrase appeared in an infamous 2017 column in The Philadelphia Inquirer, entitled Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture written by Amy Wax and Larry Alexander.

In the column, Wax and Alexander complained that a move away from the traditional values and culture of the United States was causing a steady decline in the standard of living.

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

The article claimed that – regardless of ethnicity or faith or any other demographic concern – there is an optimal set of values that promote a “good” society. They referred to this repeatedly as “bourgeois culture” or “the bourgeois cultural script.”

I’ve seen this argument before. Examples:

• Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about basically the same thing in a famous 1994 article entitled “Defining Deviancy Down (PDF)”. For example: “…we have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized…”

• Ben Sasse made the same argument in his 2018 book Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal. He outlined a four-step path to success: get an education, get a job, get married, and have children, in that order (which is, essentially, the “the bourgeois cultural script”).

However, Wax and Alexander went a bit further with this statement, which was the main focus of the ensuing uproar:

All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.

Their view was that “bourgeois culture” was superior to other cultures (meaning, sets of shared values), and the United States was moving away from this culture, to its peril.

The fallout from the column was intense, and it culminated in September 2024 when Wax was suspended from her teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania (she had long-standing tenure, thus the protracted time to impose a penalty).

Defenders of Wax claimed that nothing she wrote was offensive, because the concept of “culture” was independent of race or faith or other demographic conditions. Effectively, anyone can adopt the shared values that Wax and Alexander praised as “bourgeois culture.” Detractors claimed that the entire argument was simply racism in disguise, since the negative “culture” was most closely associated with Blacks and Hispanics.

(Note that while this particular column was very carefully engineered to avoid accusations around race, Wax is well-known for regularly saying things that appear to be blatantly racist.)

So, is “bourgeois culture” a common term outside its appearance in this column?

…maybe. But probably not with the same meaning that Wax and Alexander were intending.

“Bourgeois” is a disputed term in itself. Some use it to refer to the upper class or wealthy members of society. Others use it to refer to the “functioning middle class,” meaning those members of a society that possess assets and generate income through work. The common denominator seems to be: “not poor.” The bourgeois might be considered the economic “backbone” of a society – the class which keeps the economy moving.

(The root of the word itself is Old French for “town dweller,” meaning craftsmen, shopkeepers, and business people who lived in the city and participated in its economy, rather than the subsistence farmers or nomadic peoples.)

If we consider the “functional middle class” definition, the question becomes: do they exhibit a set of shared values that we can mentally package as a “culture”? Superficially, yes. However, Karl Marx and others have argued that the cause and effect is backwards: these people didn’t accumulate economic power because of their culture; rather their culture proliferated because of their economic power (they call this “cultural hegemony”).

As for the actual phrase “bourgeois culture,” a Google Trends search shows no search activity prior to September 2017.

The Wikipedia page for “bourgeois” does have a section entitled “Bourgeois Culture,” but this appears to have been added in a 2022 revision.

Interestingly, a Google Ngram search shows an uneven usage of the phrase starting in 1900, peaking in 2017.

Finally, a Google Books search shows the phrase in several book titles, prior to 2017.

So, the phrase “bourgeois culture” did exist at some level prior to the infamous 2017 column, but it’s doubtful it was used in the same context. In many cases, it appears to refer to a specific intersection of French history and economics.