The bourgeoisie disappeared as a self-conscious class by the 1970s

Evidence

But, as it turned out, the two braces in the older structure were more interdependent than they once had seemed. … For within the span of another twenty years, the bourgeoisie too — in any strict sense, as a class possessed of self-consciousness and morale — was all but extinct. Here and there, pockets of a traditional bourgeois setting can still be found in provincial cities of Europe, and perhaps in certain regions of North America, typically preserved by religious piety: family networks in the Veneto or Basque lands, conservative notables in the Bordelais, parts of the German Mittelstand, and so on. But by and large, the bourgeoisie as Baudelaire or Marx, Ibsen Or Rimbaud, Grosz or Brecht — or even Sartre or O’Hara — knew it, is a thing of the past. In place of that solid amphitheatre is an aquarium of floating, evanescent forms — the projectors and managers, auditors and janitors, administrators and speculators of contemporary capital: functions of a monetary universe that knows no social fixities or stable identities. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 223

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘aquarium versus amphitheatre’ image — post-bourgeois society as a fluid, identityless aquarium — could anchor an essay on how economic class dissolved as a felt identity while stratification persisted.
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely dense thesis: the two ‘braces’ — aristocratic under-girding and bourgeois self-confidence — died together because each depended on the other, dissolving the moral scaffolding that held capitalism together as a social order.
• XREF: connects to: The bourgeoisie as a thinking subject with interests is an empty notion — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 50

Broader Connections

• The bourgeoisie as a thinking subject with interests is an empty notion #corroborates (0.85) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 50