Chains of Connection
Rethinking the Bourgeoisie
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12740583 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Theodore Koditschek (University of Missouri, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 285-301 |
| Publication date | 2017-07-11 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Modern Intellectual History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1479-2443 • E-ISSN: 1479-2451 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1479244317000257 |
| OpenAlex | W2734504721 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 22 |
Since his first year in graduate school, Jerrold Seigel has puzzled over the relationship between modernity and the bourgeoisie. Willing to acknowledge the salience of this class in the making of the modern, he grew increasingly troubled by the failure of every effort to give a clear account of its distinctive historical role. To define the bourgeoisie as simply the group(s) in the middle, “all those who are neither peasants nor workers on the one side, nor aristocrats by birth on the other,” might be empirically accurate, he reasoned, but this provided no analytical insight into the processes of history. The Marxist alternative avoids this vacuity, but only by creating a mythology of the ascendant bourgeoisie—a class that by mere dint of its privileged relation to capital is deemed to be capable of entirely transforming the realms of culture, politics, and the material world. Dissatisfied with these conventional approaches, Seigel introduced a fundamentally new way of thinking in his seminal synthesis Modernity and Bourgeois Life , which sought to replace the “traditional nominative formulation [of the bourgeoisie's role] with ones that are more adjectival and historical.” Considering “‘bourgeois’, not in terms of the rise of a class,” he has reconceptualized this term to denote “the emergence and elaboration of a certain ‘form of life’.” It is in connection with this project that Seigel developed the two key concepts that will be considered in this essay, “chains of connection” and “networks of means” ( MBL , ix, 6, 25)
Aesthetics · Bourgeoisie · Epistemology · Marxist philosophy · Modernity · Petite bourgeoisie · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Social Policy and Reform Studies
The Classic Slum
Nations and Nationalism since 1780
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Political Parties
Rethinking the French Revolution
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Nations and Nationalism
Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties
The possibilities of theory
Gender and the Politics of History
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
Reading Gramsci in English
A Life Apart
Political power and social classes
Imagined communities
Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
The Machiavellian Moment
| Highly cited | No |
|---|