Tag: middle class

Concern for Household Economy in 17th Century England

I am reading a book of autobiographical writings from Quaker women who lived in England between 1650 to 1690. These were the years of the “sufferings” for the Society of Friends, when they were persecuted by both the Church of England and the puritanical sects. The government banned their meetings in many counties, and the populace was extremely hostile toward them. In addition to violence and imprisonment, Quakers were often taken to court so that their goods could be seized. Since their beliefs restricted them from taking oaths, they were unable to defend themselves on the stand, and so, often lost the cases brought against them. Of all the offenses the Quakers had to endure—beatings, public humiliation, wrongful incarceration, loss of social standing, estrangement from family—confiscation of property and lands seems to have been for many the most injurious and intolerable. Alice Curwen was the wife of a shopkeeper in Bristol. She and her husband were both Quakers and withstood constant harassment from their neighbors and relatives, but when the king’s officers came to her store and carried off some of her merchandise, she followed them all over the city and would not leave their company until they returned what they had taken from her. In her autobiography, Mary Pennington complains at length about the confiscation of her lands in Kent. Pennington was the mother-in-law of William Penn and was reasonably well-off, with a number of farms from which she collected rent. The loss of this income seems to have affected her a great deal and she still seemed to hold a grudge against those who were responsible writing almost 15 years after:

“As such, they stoned, abused, and imprisoned us, at several towns and meetings where we went. This not being enough to prove us, and work for us a far more exceeding weight of glory, it pleased the Lord to try us by the loss of our estate, which was wrongfully withheld from us, by our relations suing us unrighteously. Our own tenants withheld what the law gave, and put us into the Court of Chancery, because we could not swear. Our relations also taking that advantage, we were put out of our dwelling-house, in an injurious, unrighteous manner. Thus we were stripped of my husband’s estate, and a great part of mine.” (1676)

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One might think that the Quakers would be more willing to eschew material wealth and earthly comforts and accept a more ascetic life. This was the case for some but no for most. Many of the Quakers in the 17th century occupied a new, burgeoning middle class that was beginning to take hold in the provincial cities of England. They were small landowners, private farmers, shopkeepers and tradesman and were very much concerned with gradually and steadily accumulating wealth and bettering their position in the world. This sort proved incredibly valuable to the Quaker movement because they possessed surplus wealth and were not yet affiliated with the old feudal powers of church and aristocracy. Thus we see among the puritans of that age a major emphasis on personal prosperity (see post on Visible Saints).

New behavior in regard to wealth management and household economy could be seen all over England at that time. Samuel Pepys, writing just after the Restoration, exhibits an obsessive interest in his accounts. He keeps a regular record of his net worth in his diaries and reports every gain and loss outside of his normal income and expenses, even money obtained through bribes and collusion. One of my favorite entries in the Diaries of Samuel Pepys comes from a day in the winter of 1664 when Pepys discovers that he can save himself the expense of going to the barber everyday by learning to shave himself. After buying a razor and trying it, he reports with some astonishment that it is actually very easy to do and that he will shave himself everyday henceforth. Of course, Pepys is missing the whole point of going to the barber. This was a custom of the aristocracy, imitated by the professional classes, that signified power of coercion. The nobility demonstrated their right to power by abstaining from all work, a renunciation that included the labor of dressing and grooming oneself. To men of the middle classes who engaged in work daily and who defined themselves to a great degree by the work they did, such reservations made no sense. What we see in Pepys’s determination to shave himself is the incremental formation of a new value system, founded on industriousness, self-reliance, prosperity, and thrift.

Without Classes

I recently read a book of essays by an Italian philosopher named Giorgio Agamben. The work is titled “The Coming Community”. It was published in Italian in 1990 and appeared in English in 93. As best I can tell, the book advances a view of ontology in which being is defined by potentiality and a contingent everything-and-nothing relationship to phenomena rather than the traditional dichotomy between ideals and tautology that has always dominated the western discussion about metaphysics. He characterizes this new ontology as “whatever singularity”. Use of the term “whatever” (qualunque in Italian) is intended to denote a synthesis of the particular and the general, or a continual vacillation between the two. Because this system of meaning is predicated on allowance rather than differentiation, it creates unities as opposed to divisions. This coalescing of factors results in singularity, which is the basis fo the coming community that Agamben envisions.

In one of the book’s more lively chapters, Agamben explores the social implications of whatever singularity in contemporary class relations. His conclusions are surprising and not altogether plausible in my opinion. But I do think he’s correct. Here’s what he says about class in contemporary society:

“If we had once again to conceive of the fortunes of humanity in terms of class, then today we would have to say that there are no longer social classes, but just a single planetary petty bourgeoisie, in which all the old social classes are dissolved.”

He goes on to describe the qualities of this universal class…

“The planetary petty bourgeoisie… has taken over the aptitude of the proletariat to refuse any recognizable social identity…. They know only the improper and the inauthentic and even refuse the idea of a discourse that could be proper to them. That which constituted the truth and falsity of the peoples and generations that have followed one another on the earth—differences in language, of dialect, of ways of life, of character, of custom, and even the physical particularities of each person—has lost any meaning for them and any capacity for expression and communication.”

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I don’t disagree with his premise, that the dissolution of determinate meanings is causing a collapse of social divisions. And there are plenty of reasons to think that a homogenization of social relations is taking place and that the modern profusion of shared dependencies has lashed together all the peoples of the world to a common destiny. But there are other ways in which our differences are becoming more entrenched and more seemingly insurmountable. To say that we are all merging into a universal middle class seems naïve. There are entire regions of the globe where people still rely on subsistence farming, while in other sectors the rich and privileged classes reign supreme like feudal lords. Perhaps it could be said that the nations of the world are moving toward an industrialized, consumer-driven social model, but it’s premature to say that they are all likely to make it there.

Agamben goes on to point out that although the exponents of this new social order of the planetary petty bourgeoisie have willingly consigned themselves to anonymity and rootlessness, they still grasp in vain for meaningful identity; perhaps as a habit of ideological thinking or out of fear of the unknown and the unknowable. He predicts that the continued execution of this futile enterprise might culminate in mankind’s destruction. If not, we may progress to a new era of possibility and unity:

“If instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity—if humans could, that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable.”

Here Agamben sounds distinctly utopian—or dystopian, if you like. A world whose inhabitants embrace the whatever singularity is a world with neither identity nor stable classifications. It is a world of only surfaces, no depth. Depth is fallacy; only the surface is to be trusted, and in this world where the surface is revered and taken at face value, the surface constitutes the extent of the known. There are no other concerns. That deeper sequence of causalities that we accept as phenomenon goes utterly unacknowledged. Supplementary information becomes useless.

What changes most, I think, is how we think of human beings. A person is neither esteemed an individual nor a member of a group. Man looses agency and he loses sense of belonging. I don’t see how free will could have a place in this world. It seems that everything would be pre-determined. Everything just is. There is no play.

The Demise of the Productive Classes

In a previous post, I described the European aristocracy’s fading relevance during the 19th century. I characterized this decline as a cultural shift, perpetuated by changing attitudes toward social roles and class following the Age of Enlightenment. I do not disavow this claim, but I must concede that really the more influential factors were economic. The development of industrial production in European cities caused an absolute explosion of capital which propelled the productive classes into a place of sudden prominence. With their fortunes still tied to the land and to agricultural output the aristocracy largely missed out on the industrial boom. Thus their wealth and power were eventually eclipsed by that of a new enterprising class which was more interested in generating new capital rather than protecting old. This was the bourgeois revolution, an age when society ceased to be ordered around obedience to traditional authority and transitioned instead into an organized system in which individuals conformed to capital markets to discover and exploit opportunities for new production. It should sound familiar because it is our own age. It is the dawn of modernity, industrial development and the rise of market capitalism. As for the old order, it was swept aside in the tumult and allowed to burn itself out in quite resignation.

The lesson to be learned is that class systems change, often very rapidly; sometimes in violent revolution, sometimes as a symptom of changing economic conditions. Ostensibly, our modern class system has progressed has not progressed much beyond what it was following the overthrow of the Ancien Régime. Our society is still ordered around property ownership, market exchange and obedience to law. According to Marx this is “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” invented for the growth of capital and freely expressed productivity. And like all systems it follows the same pattern of ascent and decline. Marx predicted that the bourgeois order would be toppled by the proletariat and that the working classes would rise up to supplant the owning classes, in the same way that the owning classes wrested control away from the noble class. It would seem history has not played out that way, not exactly. In fact, one could argue it is the working classes which have been marginalized over the course of modern history and have gradually been rendered irrelevant. The cause of this unexpected turn of events is 1: automation of work processes and 2: globalization of capital. Productivity within the world’s post-industrial economies is derived from mechanized labor; this has been the primary reason productivity has continued increasing in the industrialized world even though population growth has more or less stalled out. Outside of the post-industrial economies, traditional industry and human labor remain relevant and continue to escalate, but the effect this has on core capitalist economies is such that industrial labor vanishes. Slavoj Zizek explains our current economic milieu quite nicely in this article from The New Left Review:

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How else should we conceive the connexion between the two mega-powers, the United States and China, for example? They relate to each other more and more as Capital and Labour. The US is turning into a country of managerial planning, banking, servicing etc., while its ‘disappearing working class’ (except for migrant Chicanos and others who mainly toil in the service economy) is reappearing in China, where a large proportion of American goods, from toys to electronic hardware, are manufactured in ideal conditions for capitalist exploitation: no strikes, little safety, tied labour, miserable wages. Far from being merely antagonistic, the relationship of China and US is actually also symbiotic. The irony of history is that China is coming to deserve the title of a ‘working class state’: it is turning into the state of the working class for American capital. (“Why We All Love to Hate Heider“)

Of course, there are still masses of people in the core economies that require employment and ever greater quantities of capital floating around those economies that require spending. Consequently we see the formation of vast service sectors which emerge out of the market to cater to that thin layer of citizenry who still has money to toss at it. But where does the wealth of the rich originate? Certainly not from the generation of capital. This is wealth derived from a rentier economy. There was a time when people became rich by extracting raw resource from the earth and refining them into manufactured products. The main driving force of the old industrial economy was creation of capital goods (goods used to create more goods). Industry supported industry and the primary aim of industry was to expand productive capacity. Now industry functions to support a sprawling consumer economy which seems to just feed on itself in a recursive fashion: people go to work to buy goods which other people go to work to make so that they themselves can buy goods that still some more people went to work to make and so on and so on. I think we can interpret this state of events as indication that we live in an age of obvious decline. The question then becomes where will we go once this decline has damaged our social fabric so thoroughly that the forces which keep everything together dissolve and change becomes inevitable? So far we’ve witnessed an increasingly exaggerated stratification of wealth—completely to be expected, I think—and lately it seems that mass unemployment will be another manifestation of the transition. But these are not final outcomes; they are transformational occurrences. I think there is something else in store for us. I haven’t a clue what.

Class Antagonisms in Early Modern Italian Theater

A few years ago I saw an 18th century Italian play put on by the University of Colorado Theater Department. It was very dull; acting was mediocre; stage direction and production desire were pretty uninspired. Costumes were good. I would have forgotten about it completely were it not for the fascinating constructions of Enlightenment Age class antagonism. The play was a throw-away piece by Carlo Goldoni, a Venetian playwright who lived for most of the 1700s and who took special interest in portraying the newly emerging middle class. This revival that I saw was a lethargic comedy of manners about the daughter of a modest merchant who is courted simultaneously by a rich but tactless bourgeois dolt and a duplicitous count who was divested of his estate and has taken to hustling the country gentry for his bread. The two suitors are interesting character types. I imagine both would have been recognizable to people of that time. The bourgeois cittadino is coarse and simple. He is incapable of conversing on subjects besides those he is acquainted with through business. He does not ride. He does not hunt. He knows nothing about books, music or art. He finds no pleasure in good food. He is a comic figure because he is so dull and rigid. He knows enough to make money but he is too little cultured to know how to spend it. I feel like such a creature must have seemed very puzzling to the old ruling classes. Auerbach talks about how the noble aristocracy of the early modern period saw the new bourgeoisie as intellectually deficient and absurd in their values. Men of middle classes earned their fortunes by cultivating specialized talents that were utilitarian. Gentlemen of the aristocracy avoided all productive work as an entitlement of their position. They received rigorous education but were free to study in a variety of disciplines. During the 16th and 17th century, learned men were appraised by the breadth of their knowledge and their ability to converse on a number of topics. Middle class men who practiced professions were thought to be as dim as any peasant. They were just prosperous, nothing more. Of course, the economic environment of a developing and modernizing Europe valued things differently, and it rewarded bourgeoisie professionalism quite handsomely. So, in the Goldoni play, it is the bourgeois factory owner who is powerful and free, and the aristocratic count who has devoted his life to refinement and observance of custom is dissipated vulnerable to the whims of fortune. It is impossible for him to reverse his decline. Tradition prohibits it, and he is too pathetic a creature to fend for himself anyway.
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Interest in Art in 19th Century Europe

I have spent the evening reading a particularly meaty chapter in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and so have nothing to add to our present discussion which left off last night with interactive poetry. I did however come across some choice bits in Auerbach which are worth sharing. I am reading the second to last chapter in the book. The subject is high art in the late 19th century and the mutual disregard artists and the public had for one another during that period. Auerbach writes, translated from German of course, “It can be safely said that, with few exceptions, the significant artists of the later nineteenth century encountered hostility, lack of comprehension, or indifference on the part of the public… On the basis of this experience many critics and artists became convinced that this was necessarily so: that the very originality of a significant new work had as its concomitant that the public, not yet accustomed to its style, found it confusing and disturbing and could become accustomed only gradually to the new language of form.”

Auerbach describes here a tension between producers and consumers of culture resulting from a transition in attitude and sensibilities that took place over the course of the nineteenth century. Previously it had been the aristocracy that had defined the taste and tenor of cultural exchange, especially in matters of art and fashion. As the European countries began to industrialize, this paradigm changed completely with the elevation of common people through the ranks of society. From this point onward, ethics, lifestyle, appearance, manners, speech, basic values would all be determined by a newly emerged middle class that promoted pragmatism, generation of wealth and, at least by then end of the century, comprised a majority of the populace. Major artists of this time were exponents of the anti-enlightenment tradition of romanticism and found almost nothing redeeming about the bourgeois way of life. Their work was polemically opposed the general public and highly critical of societal values. In response, society ignored them and occupied itself instead with pulp literature and cheap theater. Auerbach’s analysis of the dichotomy is marvelous. I shall quote it at length:

His routine comprised four songs – Jam, Billie Jean, Black or White and Heal the viagra without prescription free World. It has been advised to take one pill viagra cialis samples in a day as it can be dangerous. In the health sector, internet permits individuals to obtain extensive medical information, energyhealingforeveryone.com sildenafil uk to help them understand health issues and treatment options. Impotence may be caused one of the most acute problems that the human body can suffer from as heart disease in energyhealingforeveryone.com cialis sale one of America’s greatest killers. “Here we have the “bourgeois,” the creature whose stupidity, intellectual inertia, conceit, hypocrisy, and cowardice were attacked and ridiculed by poets, writers, artists, and critics from the romantic period on. Can we simply subscribe to their verdict? Are not these bourgeois the same people who undertook the tremendous task, the bold adventure, of the economic, scientific, and technological civilization of the nineteenth century, and who also produced the leaders of the revolutionary movements which were the first to recognize the crisis, dangers, and foci of corruption inherent in that civilization? Even the average bourgeois of the nineteenth century shared in the tremendous activity in life and labor which characterized the age. Day in and day out he led a life which was much more dynamic and exacting than the life of the elite, with their routine of idleness and their almost complete immunity from the pressure of time and duty, who represent the literary public of the ancien régime. His physical security and his property were better guarded than in former times; he had incomparably greater possibilities of rising in the world. But acquiring and preserving property, exploiting opportunities for advancement, adjusting to quickly changing conditions—all as part of the bitter competitive struggle for survival—made such great and ceaseless demands on his strength and his nerves as had never been known in earlier times… It is not surprising that these people expected and insisted that literature, and art in general, should give them relaxation, recreation, and at best an easily attained intoxication, and that they objected to the triste et violente distraction, to use an expressive phrase from Goncourts, which most of the important authors offered.”

Written in the 1940s to explain the cultural landscape of the 1860s, but it just as easily could have been describing our own time. We after all are still living in the age of the bourgeois revolution. The middle class remains the defining force in society, and its time and efforts are still tied up with the demands of industry and commerce, of the professional life. I’m so partial to the passage above because Auerbach shows a measured reverence for the achievements of the middle class. There’s almost a kind of sympathy he expresses for the bourgeois’s material inability to absorb high concepts and virtuosic expression. He has none of the resentment for the middle classes exhibited by your typical Marxist, or should I say self-loathing, since most Marxists in this day and age are themselves members of the middle class. Auerbach is willing to acknowledge the value of either side’s position, bohemian and bourgeoisie, and has a clearer view of both for doing so.

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Trask, Willard R. 50th anniversary ed. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. 500-502