Abstract
Legacies of a nineteenth-century bourgeois world surround us, from the art collections we admire to the Newport mansions we visit to the foodstuffs we fancy. Our American cultural landscape has been shaped by the ethos, preferences, and practices of one of the world’s most powerful nineteenth-century economic elites—the American bourgeoisie. The museums, philharmonic orchestras, and operas they created inspire to this day. The buildings they constructed continue to give shape to many of our cities. The institutional forms they developed and the host of institutions they established structure our public life. Most distinctively, the nineteenth-century American bourgeoisie combined familiar forms of economic might and political power with a new form of cultural clout: because of this, nowhere in the world did a bourgeoisie emerge as influential as that in American cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco.
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Notes
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For the use of the term “bourgeoisie” similar to our uses in this volume, see T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Anti-modernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1800–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), especially xvi.
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Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (originally published in 1979) explored these basic dynamics.
See also Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan, eds., Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790–1850 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Here we disagree with Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955).
See for the general idea Ira Katznelson, “Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons,” in Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg, eds., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 3–41.
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Gunilla Budde, Blütezeit des Bürgertums (Darmstadt: WBG, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009), surveys the most recent literature.
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© 2010 Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum
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Beckert, S., Rosenbaum, J.B. (2010). Introduction. In: The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115569_1
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