Preface

In my second semester of graduate school, the professor who soon became my main advisor – a deeply serious man with a broad streak of playful irony – assigned me the boggling task of regaling the following week’s seminar with ten minutes of reflection on the question: “What is the bourgeoisie?” How I sought to meet his challenge is not worth recalling, but in many ways I have been trying to face up to it ever since. Among the disparate subjects I have attempted to teach and write about over the years, a number turn out to have been linked together by a not-always-evident effort to chisel out bits and pieces of an answer: Karl Marx, French bohemianism, the history of modern thinking about the self, even the career of Marcel Duchamp. Except that I have come to think that we do better to recast the question, replacing its traditional nominative formulation with ones that are more adjectival and historical: why does the modifier “bourgeois” bear a range of meanings that often apply to people, things, actions, and ideas outside the social group it is supposed to designate? What does this array of meanings tell us about the link often posited between bourgeois life and modernity? How does this relationship between the things we call bourgeois and those we call modern alter as both of its components change over time? These questions are not always explicitly addressed in Modernity and Bourgeois Life – the Introduction sets out the ones that are – but they outline the historical and analytical space the book attempts to explore.