Children Of The Bourgeois Society

The idea of a “public,” an informed collection of citizens invested in the common good and preservation of the state, reached fruition during the Enlightenment. Curiously, the coffee shop or café became the unofficial center of this new entity. Citizens would gather to read whatever literature was available, to engage in heated conversation with neighbors, or to ponder the affairs of state. What made this kind of revolution in free time possible was an increasingly urban, sophisticated population coupled with the steady progress of industrialization. The coffee houses became the stomping grounds of some of the greatest thinkers of the age. Indeed, democracy would have been unachievable if the citizens had no community forum in which to commiserate, plan, and debate their needs and desires. Grassroots political movements were the natural outgrowth of these populist venues. It must be stated, of course, that this public entity was still a very exclusive one. Women, minorities, and the lower classes were not exactly welcomed into this new civil discourse. For all the high-minded discussion of a new, egalitarian social order, the western world was still predominantly owned by middle class men.

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and laws of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation”.

Communal living has been a fixture of society since the days of hunter-gathering. It wasn’t until social classes began to emerge and forms of capitol were created that societies moved away from communism. The modern theory of communism comes from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’, The Communist Manifesto. Published in 1848, this dissemination of communist ideals, which called for the elimination of class

According to Socrates, when democracy has an excessive freedom with its citizens, tyranny is inevitably present. Since the young man who was educated by “thrifty parents who preferred wealth-seeking desires” (572 c). Despised what had to do With the proper education of the individual and the healthy fun, however, when this young man grows up he finds friends who influence negatively inculcating values away from the family, then this young man already become a man begins to fall into excesses, vices, and corruption. For this very reason, the young tyrant, seeing that these two forces,

Bourgeoisie was people that belonged to the Third Estate. About 97 percent of people belonged to it. Most of this Estate lacked many privileges. To go along with the Third Estate there was also a First and Second. In the First Estate it was made up of all people ordained for religious duties in the Roman Catholic Church, and they believed Enlightenment ideas were worthless. The second Estate was made up of rich nobles, they held highest offices in the government, and disagreed about Enlightenment ideas. There were three different major groups that made up the Third estate. The first group was middle class people, these people were factory owners, bankers, professionals, merchants, and skilled artisans. These people were well educated and believed

In this document, Mazzini largely focuses on how the ideas circulated after the French Revolution regarding the rights of man have corrupted the true nature of a nation by creating a culture of greed and egoism. While he openly discourages the erasure and pursuit of these rights, he is quick to point out that individuals’ egoism and each nation’s separation of class “… has grown and grows worse in nearly every country, and especially where I write the price of the necessaries of life has gone on continually rising, the wages of the working-man in many branches of industry falling and the population multiplying” (87). He argues here that allowing any nation to be solely characterized by the rights of its citizens causes a nation to define itself based on the millions of individuals, dividing any community or society—which he believes is the backbone of the nation. In Mazzini’s view, the solution to this is by fostering a national culture of duty to one another. When he asks, “What is Society but a collection of men who have agreed to bring the strength of the many in support of the rights of each?” the audience is forced to question their own personal hierarchy between rights and duties; for what is a nation if there is no work or duty in achieving and maintaining the rights of every man within the nation (89)?

The general understanding of democracy is that it is a state of leadership where citizens of a country participate equally either directly or by representative individuals in the establishment of laws, which run the society. However, like many other forms of leadership, democracy has its cons and may not give the citizens the necessary freedoms that they think they have. Different philosophers have different insights on democracy in terms of concepts such as liberty, which they embraced. This paper will look at Benjamin Barber and Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of democracy contrasting their definition in terms of citizenship, obligation, rights and duties of each individual in the society declaring whose idea of democracy creates a compelling vision (Terchek & Conte, 2001).

There was once a time when the societies of the world were nothing more than a ruling class and a class that was ruled. In these feudal societies classes were set. There was little chance for a member of the ruling bourgeoisie class to cross over to the oppressed proletariat class or from the proletariat class to the bourgeoisie class. Every individual within each class had the routine for each day set out for him or her. There was little change in the lives of individuals of these societies. There was monotony in their work and their work did little more for them than keeping them alive. In those societies,

Marx’s political theory is based on the idea that social history has been defined by a series of class struggles. When a new class overtakes the prior ruling class, a new order emerges. Ideally, this new order would be an improvement on the past system. But in reality, misery still exists in tiers of society because the new systems typically embody a similar model of the oppressed-oppressor relationship, where lower classes are exploited in a similar way. The modern bourgeois society “has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones” (14). In this way, new systems are part of a natural progression of society, but they continue to exhibit

In contrast, a relatively small group of German bourgeois intellectuals spoke German instead of French. However, unlike the French and English courts, the German courts “did not possess sufficient confidence to integrate bourgeois groupings into their social circles” (Dunning and Hughes, 2013: 84). In other words, the German bourgeois intellectuals were excluded from the courts and had no voice within the decision-making process. As Fletcher (1997: 8) pointed out, the “bourgeoisie were effectively politically impotent.” Consequently, to differ themselves from the court nobility, who were associated with Zivilisation, the bourgeois intellectuals developed their own self-identity and worldview in the form of Kultur. This concept, therefore, represented

Many societies rely and thrive on a unified behavioral agreement amongst their people that can be governed rationally. This unified behavior is commonly known as the social contract. This contract is said to be a way of nature and some philosophers believe it to be a gimmick for social institutions to control and manipulate their people. To explicate this social contract even further, I will be focusing on Sigmund Freud’s, a scientific materialist, and Karl Marx’s, a revolutionary socialist, concepts on community norms. When comparing Sigmund Freud’s outlook on how communities function with Karl Marx’s, one will understand that Freud’s explanations are more compelling and relatable.

Karl Marx describes “Society as a whole [as being] more and more [split] up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other-bourgeoisie and proletariat” (Marx 124).  As Marx made his distinction between upper class, bourgeoisie, and lower class, proletariats, it is important to keep in mind the societal structure at the time.  To understand how classes were created and the disparity between the rich and poor, or, bourgeoisie and proletariat, it is necessary to examine how people came to be rich and poor.  Exploring a time before money existed will help us to process and understand reasons why the binary between rich and poor exists and how it is reflective of low and high art distinctions.

The second type of society is modern society. We evolved from the primitive society structure and functionality. A highly differentiated social structure is said how modernity is to be characterized. (Seidman, 1998) There are specialized social institutions that differentiate individuals in the social structure (e.g., the economy, family, education, welfare, military, polity) and regulate the behaviour of the individual. Individualism is the public religion in this culture. The beliefs and morals held in common among individuals are to be highly general and abstract unlike how it is the primitive society. There are two social forces that are powerful in promoting individualism. The first is how advance the division of labor that the individual is required to have more freedom to control their institutional behaviour. The second is the given in a differentiated society the state or the church has any right to impose their social rules to dictate institutions, it is only up to the individual in their social roles in those institutions. This is a clear indication of how society has developed and how Durkheim has explained this transformation in relation to the growth of modernity.

The fact that traditional societies were small in size, made possible for anyone to participate with an active and direct way in the government of his community. “Every one is urged and invited to attend public meetings, and everyone is urged to vote not as a duty but as a privilege” (Vidich: 229). In modern

These documents, at the same time, take back the sociopolitical thought that had been developped in a long tradition, and whose most striking stages are: the supreme value of reason as basis for any sociopolitical relation such as we discover at the Greek Polis and such as it is presented by the great thinkers Plato and Aristotle; the intrinsic value of human person, son of the same Christian God, and capable, because of his freedom, either of salvation or of condemnation, as it was understood by the main thinkers in the Middle Ages; the human Individual, considered as a juridical subject, capable of making contracts and assuming rights and duties and, therefore, as the last foundation of any sociopolitical organization, as he was thought by the liberal tradition embodied by Hobbes, Locke and the Encyclopedists. The concrete praxis of these theoretical principles in democratic societies and nations where the Individuals are the cause and the end of this sociopolitical order such as we find in Great Britain, Switzerland, Holland, USA, France, Sweeden, Norwegen, Canada and many other nations throughout the five continents.