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Petite bourgeoisie (French pronunciation: [pətit(ə) buʁʒwazi], literally 'small bourgeoisie'; also anglicised as petty bourgeoisie) is a term that refers to a social class composed of semi-autonomous peasants and small-scale merchants. They are named as such because their politico-economic ideological stance in times of stability is reflective of the proper haute bourgeoisie (high bourgeoisie or upper class). In regular times, the petite bourgeoisie seek to identify themselves with the haute bourgeoisie, whose bourgeois morality, conduct and lifestyle they aspire and strive to imitate.[1]
The term, which goes as far back as the Revolutionary period in France, if not earlier, is politico-economic and addresses historical materialism. It originally denoted a sub-stratum of the middle classes in the 18th and early-19th centuries of western Europe. In the mid-19th century, the German economist Karl Marx and other Marxist theorists used the term petite bourgeoisie to academically identify the socio-economic stratum of the bourgeoisie that consists of small shopkeepers and self-employed artisans.[2][3][4]
- ^ Habermas, Jürgen (1968). Technology and Science as Ideology.
Their socialization seems to have been achieved in subcultures freed from immediate economic compulsion, in which the traditions of bourgeois morality and their petit-bourgeois derivatives have lost their function.
- ^ "Petite bourgeoisie". Oxford Reference. Archived from the original on 25 May 2021. Retrieved 25 May 2021.
- ^ "Petite bourgeoisie". Encyclopaedia of Marxism. Archived from the original on 13 November 2012. Retrieved 6 March 2013 – via Marxists Internet Archive.
- ^ Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich. "1: Bourgeois and Proletarians". The Communist Manifesto. Archived from the original on 27 January 2018. Retrieved 6 March 2013 – via Marxists Internet Archive.