ABSTRACT
The historical use of “bourgeois” and “bourgeoisie” which the author is criticizing and denying is, on the contrary, the one in which by “bourgeois” and “bourgeoisie” is meant a complete spiritual personality or, correlatively, an historical epoch in which such a spiritual formation is dominant or predominant. Because of the polemical and false origin of the conception of which people are speaking the method usually used in its analysis by modern historians is to be judged as ill-founded and not very intelligent. Socialist criticism and history had no part in the mistake of rejecting and denying the so-called bourgeois era and civilization as being the embodiment of extreme degeneration, because it wanted to express the thought of a revolutionary age, not of a reactionary one, and therefore it did not want to go back but beyond the present and the past.
