The Art of Surviving Modernity

For generations, the bourgeois has been modern culture’s favorite culprit: cautious, conventional, materialistic, suspicious of genius and allergic to risk. Artists mocked him. Revolutionaries condemned him. Intellectuals pronounced him spiritually dead.

Abel Hermant does something far more interesting.

In The Bourgeois, he asks whether the qualities dismissed as bourgeois defects might conceal an extraordinary talent for survival. Moving with effortless wit from Plato and Theophrastus to Montaigne, Molière, Montesquieu, Flaubert and Thackeray, Hermant dismantles the familiar caricature and discovers beneath it a remarkably durable temperament.

The bourgeois, he argues, is not ultimately defined by money or property. His deeper principles are measure, order, balance and probity. Yet this is no hymn to respectable conformity. Hermant’s bourgeois is full of contradictions: the miser longs to spend, the conservative flirts with radicalism, the skeptic preserves religion, the philistine becomes a collector, and the enemy of fashion eventually learns to set it.

Even snobbery receives an astonishing rehabilitation. What appears to be mere vanity may become an engine of social movement. Imitation can produce taste. Ambition can produce education. Self-interest can sustain integrity. A ridiculous motive may have civilized consequences.

Behind Hermant’s irony lies a provocative theory of modern life. Civilizations, he suggests, may depend less upon heroic extremes than upon people capable of absorbing change without being destroyed by it.

The bourgeois survives because he adapts.

He turns rebellion into custom, novelty into culture and disorder into something inhabitable.

What begins as a witty portrait of a social type thus becomes something more unsettling: a meditation on the human capacity to change while remaining oneself—and on the ordinary virtues that may quietly hold a civilization together.