ABSTRACT
The theory of embourgeoisement has been deployed more specifically to explain how and why people who are not themselves bourgeois nevertheless come at various times to exhibit values and behaviors considered bourgeois. It is, of course, no simple matter to specify what is typically bourgeois, but most social historians would probably agree that the bourgeoisie-or, in Freidrich Engels’s phrase, the “class of great capitalists”—is more likely than other groups to hold to an ethos of individualism; to believe in the virtues of competition, hard work, self-denial, piety, respectability, and the nuclear family, and to give allegiance to parties that espouse these values and are committed to such classically bourgeois shibboleths as laissez-faire, free trade, frugal government, and the career open to talent (meritocracy). In fact, none of these ideas has been the exclusive property of the bourgeoisie. It is a commonplace, for example, that the landed classes in England were engaged in commercial agriculture long before the rise of manufacturing industry in the 18th century, and in their pursuit of profits acted thoroughly bourgeois. Likewise, peasants have frequently shown themselves as capable of calculating their selfinterest-and acting upon it-as any middle-class devotee of the liberal economist Adam Smith. Hence the occasional use of the term to explain such cases.
