Bourgeois adoption of aristocratic style consolidated, not abdicated, bourgeois class rule
Evidence
More generally, Eric Hobsbawm argues that we should see the nineteenth century, not as that of ‘the persistence of the ancien régime’, but rather as that of ‘the triumph and transformation of capitalism in the historically specific forms of bourgeois society in its liberal version’. While the bulk of the bourgeoisie, basking in the prosperity characteristic at least in urban life of the second half of the century, developed a distinctive ‘less formal, more genuinely private and privatized lifestyle’, big capital ‘had no great difficulty in organizing itself as an elite, since it could use methods very similar to those used by aristocracies, or even - as in Great Britain - the actual mechanisms of aristocracy’. The haut-bourgeois adoption of aris tocratic lifestyle was not ‘simply an abdication of bourgeois before old aristocratic values’. Thus the essentially novel use of ‘socialization through elite (or any) schools … assimilated aristocratic values to a moral system designed for a bourgeois society and its public service.’ Mayer himself notes that secondary education throughout nineteenth-century Europe was characterized by an increased stress on the classics - a trend which one might plausibly represent as an attempt to integrate (to borrow Matthew Arnold’s terms) bourgeois ‘Philistines’ and aristocratic ‘Barbarians’ into a common ruling class rather then to subordinate one group to the other. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 189
Categorization
- XREF: Ties to the Marxism and Form entries on how ideological/intellectual fusions in thought reflect prior lived syntheses — the bourgeois-aristocratic fusion is a class-level analogue. — connects to: Modern individualism democratized what was originally an aristocratic status privilege — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 285