BOURGEOISIE

in socioeconomic theory, the social order that is dominated by the so-called middle class. The term arose in medieval France, where it referred to the inhabitants of walled towns. These townspeople practiced arts and crafts and occupied an intermediate position in the economic and social scale between the rural landlords and peasantry. With the introduction of mechanical power into urban industry and the growth of the factory system, the medieval craftsmen began to separate into two classesemployers and employeesand the growth of a new kind of class consciousness tended to restrict the idea of bourgeois to the employers. Thus arose a system of economic and social classification that emphasized the distinction between bourgeoisie (or capitalists) and proletariat (q.v.). This distinction became politically important in the early 19th century in the course of the reaction against the undiscriminating democratic idealism that flourished during the French Revolution. Later, Marxists built an insupportable system of social and political philosophy on this distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat. That the attempt to create a comprehensive philosophy of history and politics on this narrow basis was unrealistic is demonstrated by the subsequent struggles between different schools of socialism and communism. Karl Marx's early collaborator, Friedrich Engels, made the first breach in the Marxist system when he admitted the importance of evolution as well as revolution in the development of human society. The successors of Marx and Engels, from Karl Kautsky and Vladimir Lenin to Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev, were forced to make increasing concessions to the realities of modern industrial and political life. The Marxist theory of social classification yielded to a growing recognition of the baffling complexity of modern society and politics. In the most advanced capitalistic countries there is a strong tendency to revert to one of the oldest schemes of social and political classification. Aristotle's system of politics emphasized the distinctions among three classesupper, middle, and lowerand stressed the importance of the middle class in a well-ordered state. But in contemporary politics these major classes are highly complex, and there is no part of them that can be identified as the bourgeoisie. The word bourgeois retains its practical utility chiefly in discussions of art and manners, where it usually is used disparagingly to characterize a concern for material interests and respectability, with a tendency toward mediocrity. In much of Western discourse, bourgeoisie had nearly disappeared from the vocabulary of political writers and politicians by the mid-20th century.