The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

74 chapter 2they often came. Such lower-middle-class folk were working stiffs. It was thenonworking bond holders and the boodling politicians and the arrogantbureaucrats, the parasites on all working people, who evoked their wrath, àla Michael Moore. Damned right. Johnston notes that in the survey ofAkron, Ohio, residents in 1941 by Alfred Winslow Jones the lower-middleclass “sought a ‘middle ground’ between collectivism and absolute propertyrights.” The majority of Akron’s small business owners “believed that unemployedminers should steal coal to keep warm, that the Flint sit-down strikewas proper, and that neighbors should prevent farm auctions and evictionof renters.” 13La grande bourgeoisie, the clerisy, la petite bourgeoisie: objectively bourgeoisall.One can be in science a lumper or a splitter, talking about chest and hipstructures of the great apes in general or of humans in particular. Johnstonis right that you can for some purposes usefully split the lower-middle classfrom the rest, and study it comparatively. But of course the choice is pragmatic,depending on your purpose. If your purpose is Johnston’s, to rescuethe lower-middle class of our great-grandparents from demonization byhistorians of Nazi Germany like Arno Mayer, who on slender evidence haveassigned fascism to shop owners, then you split. 14If your purpose is mine, to begin “redeeming the middling folk,” as Johnstonputs it, all of them—though especially the nonintellectuals despisedsince 1848 by the clerisy—then you lump everybody from sweating assistantmanagers to glittering CEOs.There’s no permanent thing out there in the world for all times and allpurposes called “the middle class.” Social categories, no less than the anatomyof great apes, evolve, and furthermore what will matter about the categoriesto the social scientist depends on time and on human purposes. Statisticsand other facts are relevant, but never come supplied with their own interpretation.Johnston cites on this point the great British student of the workingclass, E. P. Thompson, who argued that over a generation or two there arechanges in its definition. 15 Likewise one can see in English history a bourgeoisieof subordination to the charter-granting power c. 1249 evolving intoa bourgeoisie of confidence c. 1649, beheading an anointed king, and thenc. 1949 evolving into a bourgeoisie of generality and even of honor.We are all bourgeois now, a bourgeois apologist would say, or we shouldwork on becoming so, because work after all is a good thing. Not a dishonor.