A Brief History of the Petite Bourgeoisie

A brief history of the petite bourgeoisie by Ryan MacMacon.

Inflation, bailouts, and ultra-low interest rates

have widened the wealth gap in the United States.

This is no natural market phenomenon,

but is driven largely by monetary inflation,

which always benefits some groups at the expense of others.

This has become more apparent during our current age

of cronyist interventionism, which accelerated following

the global financial crisis of 2008.

The trend was, again, solidified during the COVID panic

when forced business closures and 40-year highs

in price inflation put further stress

on the more marginal businesses.

Since then, many observers have increasingly noted

mounting evidence of a so-called K-shaped economy

in which higher income households see greater gains

in wealth and income than do lower income households.

Through it all, government policy has had a key role

in the redistribution of wealth.

This is hardly a new phenomenon, however,

and we can find many insights into how it all works

thanks to classical liberal exploitation theory.

Decades before the Marxist came along,

the classical liberals exposed how some classes

exploit other classes.

Through taxes and inflation, government regimes,

transfer wealth from the more productive members of society

to the less productive ones.

Class warfare is real.

For at least two centuries, political theorists

have attempted to identify and understand

the ways that various social and economic classes

have interacted within the system of state exploitation.

In the writings of the liberal theorists

who explored the system of legal plunder,

that is, Frederick Bastia, William Leggett,

Alfredo Parato, and John Taylor of Caroline, among others,

we often find the familiar terminology of class

and economic interests.

There are the bourgeoisie, the stock jobbers,

the industrialists, the landowners,

and the forces of big business.

Some groups we are told are more inclined toward production,

while others are more often found among the exploiters

and parasites.

Among these classes, we also find a group

that is often ignored, or at least it is infrequently mentioned.

It is the class small enterprise,

the owners of small factories, the artisans,

and the shopkeepers, or to use a term

more frequently found outside the United States,

the petite bourgeoisie.

In this essay, I'll take a closer look at the petite bourgeoisie

and the various ways that political theorists

have attempted to describe it and classify it.

The petite bourgeoisie has often been placed

among the more productive economic classes,

and this group has been romanticized to an extent

that other social classes have not,

with the exception of the workers.

Ironically though, the petite bourgeoisie

in the United States is rarely among the groups

driving significant changes in policy or public debate.

When it comes down to actually creating government policy,

the interests of small enterprise are often ignored.

Rather, we end up with a political debate

with a populist focus on wage earners on the one hand,

with too big to fail mega businesses on the other.

Who are the petite bourgeoisie?

Small enterprise has long been central

to national economies, including industrialized economies.

Even after more than a century of accelerating industrialization

and growing economies of scale,

the small business economy in the United States

contributes more than 40% of all GDP

and small businesses employ more than 45%

of all private sector employees.

Even into the mid 20th century,

as big business greatly increased its role

in national economies, small enterprise

remained the primary driver of employment and production.

These sorts of statistics however,

raise the problem of defining what exactly is small business

and what is the class of people involved in small enterprise.

The US government generally defines small business

as firms with fewer than 500 employees.

This however, tells us very little

about the broader social characteristics

of the world of small enterprise

or put another way what sets this group apart

from other economic groups such as the bourgeoisie,

the working class, the proletariat, or the rich.

The answer in part is found in the terminology used to describe

what sort of work is done by people

in the world of small enterprise.

However, terms like petite bourgeoisie imply

that this is a group of people

who have specific social and cultural characteristics

and are not just the people involved

in certain lines of work.

One thing that is important to note

is that the petite bourgeoisie

is not at all synonymous with the term middle class.

Is is not the case that everyone

who is generally considered to be middle class

is also engaged in small enterprise

or holds to the value system of the petite bourgeoisie.

For example, in many times in places,

especially in 18th and 19th century Western Europe,

work in the civil service was often considered

a gateway to the middle class.

Yet government bureaucrats are clearly not working

in small business, nor would the values

of the typical civil servant reflect

those of the petite bourgeoisie.

Moreover, someone who is a middle manager

at a huge corporation can also be part of the middle class,

but is obviously not someone engaged in small enterprise.

Rather to be in small enterprise

means to be engaged in work that is combined

the ownership of productive private property

with skilled labor performed by the property owner himself

or by those close to him.

These owners often work alongside their employees

in workshops, small factories, and offices.

This is in contrast to larger enterprises

where managers often oversee workers

through highly hierarchical structures

that tend to physically distance the owners

from the workers.

In many cases, but not all cases,

the petite bourgeois property owner adopts a role

as an entrepreneur investing capital into efforts

to adapt to changes in the marketplace

and to address unmet wants among consumers,

artisans, shopkeepers, family farmers, and mechanics.

What are the specific lines of work

that are common among the property owners

of small enterprise?

One of the earliest theorists to explore the effects

of state redistribution on wealth

was John Taylor of Carolyn.

In some of his earlier works, such as found in Arritor 1818,

Taylor repeatedly refers to farmers and mechanics

as the foundation of a free economy.

In this context, mechanic means a small-scale skilled labor

that is an artisan who likely owns his own tools

and may even have a physical workshop.

Taylor routinely places the mechanics alongside agriculturalists

as the primary examples of the productive classes.

In Taylor's view, the productive classes

also appear to include smaller merchants, lawyers,

and others we would today call professionals

and practitioners of the trades.

These productive classes are then contrasted by Taylor

with those that rely more on a protecting duty monopoly

or bounties and other government subsidies

that advantage the parasitic classes

that benefit from pecuniary privileges

provided by government protection.

These include bankers, speculators, and large merchants.

Large manufacturing enterprises

protected as they were by protective tariffs

were also counted by Taylor among the unproductive classes

of courtiers.

During the 1830s, the Jacksonians further built upon this idea

of productive classes contrasted with the exploiter classes

of large enterprises that were protected

and their positions by subsidies, tariffs,

government contracts, and other policies

that tended to benefit bankers and the largest firms.

As Ashworth puts it,

Jacksonian social theory looked to and hailed the independent farmer.

The independent laborer or mechanic was also approved of,

but there was little respect for manufacturers.

Merchants were recognized as indispensable

to an agrarian economy.

As we can see, while farmers may have had pride of place,

they were certainly not alone among those considered

to be productive and essential.

Similarly, in Europe, shopkeepers and artisans

were believed to be among the productive classes

forming the core of the Petite bourgeoisie.

The Petite bourgeoisie as a political and social class,

these are not just economic differences

and there are distinctions here

from a sociological standpoint as well.

As Jeffrey Crossick notes, for example,

the combination of the owner's labor and capital

within family-centered enterprises

creates a distinct position for the Petite bourgeoisie

within the social structure,

or as observed by Jeffrey Faire,

the fusion of property, family, neighborhood,

and enterprise differentiated the Petite bourgeoisie

experience from both working-class households

and the upper bourgeoisie.

The cluster of value centering on family,

local neighborhoods, work traditions,

and property formed a distinctive Petite bourgeoisie identity.

Crossick also notes that the frequent presence

of family-based businesses among Petite bourgeois

enterprises further contributed to the romanticization

of small enterprise efforts as being especially good

for family cohesion and society overall.

Later in the 19th century, the Petite bourgeois lifestyle

was further touted as providing more flexibility

and opportunity for women who could enjoy

greater leadership roles within the family business.

This idealized version of the Petite bourgeois

would prove to be important to a variety

of political coalitions in France, Germany,

the United States, and in other areas

where there was considerable public respect

for property owners who were viewed as hardworking and frugal

and as contributing to the economic well-being

of the community.

Thus, not even the Marxists committed as they were

to a focus on a conflict between the proletariat

and the bourgeoisie could deny the existence

of the Petite bourgeoisie.

In the early 1850s, Marx put the Petite bourgeoisie

alongside the classes opposed to the proletariat,

writing in response to the 1851 French coup.

The bourgeoisie public was victorious.

There rallied to its support the financial aristocracy,

the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class,

the Petite bourgeoisie, the army, the intellectuals,

the clergy, and the rural population.

The Parisian proletariat stood alone.

This reflects Marx's view later expressed in capital

that the small burger and the middle ranks of society

constitute an important class in every modern body politic.

For Marx, this was nonetheless a class

that stood opposed to the interests of the workers.

This idea continued well into the 20th century

when Murray Rothbard, in a note on modern egalitarianism,

suggested that the complexity of modern grievance politics

means one almost longs for the good old days

of classic Marxism.

When there was only one oppressed class, the proletariat,

and one or at most a very few classes of oppressors,

the capitalist or bourgeois, plus sometimes the feudal landlords,

or perhaps the Petite bourgeoisie.

Marx's recognition of the Petite bourgeoisie

as an important class reflects what historian Ralph Rayco

calls Marx's shrewd abilities in historical analysis.

While Marx was a terrible economist,

he did not necessarily lack keen observational powers

on other areas.

And while his third rate economic skills

placed the Petite bourgeoisie as an enemy of propertyless workers,

he also did correctly see that the Petite bourgeoisie

was politically at a disadvantage

when compared to the great or oat bourgeoisie.

Marx writes in Dedeucia ideology, trade and commerce

create the great bourgeoisie.

The small burger, who no longer has earlier rules the town,

but must submit to the mastery of the great merchants

and manufacturers, is concentrated in the handicraft trades.

Marx is not wrong here as far as he goes,

but he lacks the proper analytical tools,

which are provided by classical liberal exploitation theory.

This theory tells us that if the Petite bourgeoisie

are at a disadvantage, it is not due to any iron law

of economics, but is due to the presence

of the sovereign state, which taxes, regulates and inflates

to the advantage of certain favored classes.

It is in its ability to influence state action

that the great bourgeoisie is able to exercise its mastery

over the small burger and the handicraft trades.

Indeed, the reality of this political battle

between small enterprise on the one hand

and some sectors of big business

and the growing financial sector, on the other hand,

come through in the work of many keen observers

among classical liberals.

So we find in the work of John Taylor

and in the work of later Jacksonians like William Leggett,

denunciations of the paper aristocracy

and calls for the separation of bank and state

in their efforts to rein in the power of large state

connected enterprises.

Taylor and Leggett and the Jacksonian movement overall

saw in the Petite bourgeoisie a group

they identified without using the phrase,

a benign social and economic class that was more dedicated

to free markets, virtuous competition,

and more decentralized political power.

This was far from the Marxist view that the Petite bourgeoisie

were among the oppressor classes benefiting

from the exploitation of the workers

while allying with the Oat bourgeoisie

in turning the state against the propertyless masses.

Rather, experience suggested to many in the 19th century

a more likely scenario in which small enterprise

found itself at the mercy of large national interests

that routinely turned state policy in favor

of a select few industries and firms.

In the current age of too big to fail,

this would seem to be timely analysis even today.

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