Bourgeois reform feared conceptual mixing more than moral licence

Evidence

As the bourgeoisie laboured to produce the economic as a separate domain, partitioned off from its intimate and manifold interconnectedness with the festive calendar, so they laboured conceptually to reform the fair as either a rational, commercial trading event or as a popular pleasureground. As the latter, the fair had from classical times been subject to regulation and suppression on both political and moral grounds. But although the bourgeois classes were frequently frightened by the threat of political subversion and moral licence, they were perhaps more scandalised by the deep conceptual confusion entailed by the fair’s inmixing of work and pleasure, trade and play. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 337