First, networks of means function by virtue of some “medium,” an abstract criterion of interaction and exchange which can be given concrete form through some kind of institution, that is, an agreed social practice. The medium regulates access to the network, and allows flows along it to proceed; it is the role played by such abstract media that distinguishes these structures from the more directly personal networks mentioned above.6 Such media need to be abstract because they must establish an equivalence between objects, people, or circumstances that differ in their concrete qualities and characteristics; but they must also be able to take on some concrete form or character, so that they can be possessed by or assigned to particular persons. The medium that most clearly and directly fulfills these conditions is money, the exemplary constituting element of a network of means. Money acquires this capacity not through any quality of the particular substances employed to embody it – shells, crops, particular animals or parts of them, coin, paper – but by virtue of a power human groups attribute to it, implicitly or explicitly, namely generalized exchangeability. As the universal equivalent, money allows exchanges of goods to transcend the limitations of direct barter, by providing a common standard against which all commodities can be valued. It thus allows local and distant exchanges to take place on a common basis, at once enlarging the scope of market relations and providing a means to regulate the circulation of goods. Strictly speaking, however, it is the network and not the medium that is the “tool” in the sense of being able to multiply the effective power of those who use it; otherwise Simmel could not have included bureaucracies, academies, and other instruments of collective action in his list of social tools, since none of them are media. Distinguishing between networks of means and the media that regulate them clears up this confusion, and it is for this reason that “network” is preferable to Simmel’s “social tool.” But it also requires the identification of the media that correspond to money in the other networks, which Simmel did not seek to do.
Specifying them is not a simple task, however, because the qualities that correspond to universal exchangeability in the other cases are less easily embodied in material forms, and less universally designated by material tokens than is the case with markets and money. All the same there is a political counterpart to the value money represents in economic relations, namely legitimacy or legitimate authority, the criterion that regulates access to political resources, and which people seek to attach to themselves through the relations they have with others. Legitimacy takes a concrete form (without ceasing to be an abstraction) when certain powers are assigned to organs of a state or government, or when specific people or groups are accorded the right to exercise control over them.7 This concreteness is typically achieved in modern states by constitutions (most often written out), which at various times have accorded the powers just mentioned to princes and nobles, corporate groups often called estates (in French états, in German Stände), taxpayers at a certain level, and more recently the whole body of citizens, originally limited to males. Although tokens are not always required as signs of possessing this capacity, they may be, and have appeared in such varied forms as inclusion in a register of privileged persons (for instance the “Golden Book” of medieval Venice), lists of eligible office holders or voters, birth records, tax receipts, identity cards, or passports.
Almost universally, however, the power individuals exercise is presumed to derive from the political entity as a whole, so that political legitimacy is the medium that warrants particular individuals to exercise some influence over the resources that a state or population draws from itself (as well as from others, through conquest or some other means) by way of whatever network of relations joins it together. In traditional monarchies kings were regarded as the embodiment of the nation or community, and the chief source of lawful authority (even the only one, which made possible Louis XIV’s famous declaration, L’État, c’est moi). Rousseau made the rootedness of legitimate state power in the whole body of people over which it is exercised still more explicit by tracing it to the act by which a community or nation constitutes itself as a political unit, the “social contract”; the body of citizens then exercises power over itself by establishing the rule of law, made effective through some particular form of government. Such forms may be princely or aristocratic as well as democratic, depending on circumstances, but in every case they derive their legitimacy from the political nation as a whole. Governments or power holders may claim legitimacy on other, less ostensibly democratic bases, notably (as Weber listed them) tradition, which assigns authority in accord with arrangements handed down from the past, rationality, which purports to effect a proper management of a state and its resources, and “charisma,” the personal quality that identifies certain people as worthy of being followed by others. In each of these cases, however, the principle that establishes power as legitimate regulates access to the resources generated by the interactions of some recognizable community or body of people.8
As in the case of politics, identifying the vehicle that allows for and regulates flows inside communicative networks is less simple than with money and market relations. In general, however, this medium can be specified as (the term has been employed by Jürgen Habermas) “communicative competence,” the ability to send and receive particular kinds of messages. Exercising this competence may require some material implement as a precondition, such as a telegraph key and sounding device, a radio, or a computer with some kind of connection to others. But in operative networks such technical means are never sufficient without some cultural attainment: spoken or written proficiency in a language; understanding less common signs such as codes or ciphers (semaphoric signals or Morse dots and dashes); or the ability to use a specialized idiom, such as Latin, legalese, mathematics, or the terms of some learned or scientific discipline. Like legitimacy, the possession of these general means is not always signaled by a concrete token, but often it is, namely a license or certificate obtained through some test or other means of demonstrating competence at a certain level, and designating their possessors as proper or legitimate participants in and operators of the networks (as a teenager I acquired a license to be an amateur radio operator; now my colleagues and I have PhDs.). That these requirements are less substantive and less easily enforced or policed than in the other cases is one circumstance that distinguishes this species of networks from the others, with significant consequences to which I will give attention later on.
The important role that such networks play in modern life has a particular relevance to the place bourgeois people and activities have occupied in its emergence. Just as we have identified three distinct sorts of networks, so do historians and sociologists recognize three kinds of bourgeois occupations, three basic divisions that constitute the modern bourgeoisie. Of these the one most people are likely to bring to mind first consists of business people of various sorts, merchants, manufacturers, bankers, salespeople, some of them owners of their own enterprises, others managers or employees at various levels. The second category is that of administrators, including office holders, state servants, or bureaucrats, whether national or local. Officials in some private or semi-public organizations come under this rubric too. Historically these functions have sometimes been carried out by people whose aristocratic status and self-identification marked them as non-bourgeois, but even in pre-modern situations state officials were often non-noble, and government service has been a major sphere of bourgeois activity since the eighteenth century; indeed the ideal of “careers open to talent” often invoked in the era of the French Revolution and after applied especially to such occupations (as well as to military ones). The third section is made up of professionals – lawyers, notaries, doctors, architects, engineers, academics, and teachers, a group that shades off toward artists and writers, despite the resistance of some among the latter to being considered bourgeois at all.9 These categories are not sealed containers, since certain occupations may straddle them, and individuals
may move between them during their lifetimes. Some people whose activities put them in one or another of these groupings may not be bourgeois according to certain criteria, based on their level of income or wealth for instance, or aristocratic lineage, or their eventual turn to living “nobly,” without working. But categorization always makes divisions sharper than they are in actual life; the aim of this one is not to distinguish bourgeois people rigidly from each other or from non-bourgeois, but to identify the range and the chief modes of bourgeois activity.
The three bourgeois categories correspond to the three species of networks, business people belonging primarily to the market, administrators to entities that organize and direct resources within a given political formation or territory, and professionals to webs of connection that transmit and regulate information, knowledge, or skill. To be sure, professionals sometimes produce and exchange material objects, but the basic qualification or competence that identifies them as practitioners can be transmitted to others without any loss to those who already possess it; indeed passing it on may heighten or amplify their status or their ability to exercise the activity in question, which persists as long as they retain the requisite physical and mental attributes. All these occupations involve participation in networks, more or less extended in space depending on surrounding conditions. The work performed in them is done in, or at least with reference to, some identifiable location, a factory or warehouse or office, a store or shop or studio, but it is mediated through some extended structure that provides a common frame of action or reference. These linkages often set limits to what individuals can do within and through them: markets impose competition and discipline, bureaucracies subject people to regulations, professions set up obligatory standards and procedures, or minimum levels of competence. But each network also makes it possible for people associated by way of it to accomplish things they could not do in separation, giving them access to connections and resources made available through it. Manual workers and other less privileged people also labor inside such configurations, but they less often draw (and before the late nineteenth century almost never drew) the same kinds of benefits from them as do people commonly characterized as bourgeois or middle class. I will return to this difference later on.
In their functions as constituents of social life, the three networks are at once mutually interdependent and independent. The interdependence takes multiple forms. Each of the media of access proper to one or another particular network operates to some degree in the others. Money is of course at work in all of them, but so in a way are considerations of legitimacy and standards of competence or skill operative in the market. Markets rely on states for the social and legal stability that allows economic interchange to proceed regularly, as well as for defense or conquest in the interest of trade, and on communicative or professional networks both for services to productive enterprises and individuals, and for the development of media of presentation and representation that help create various sorts of links to consumers (product design, displays, advertising, etc.). States rely on market exchanges (not always free of control, to be sure) to sustain their population and develop the wealth from which tax revenues come, as well as to provide other goods that governments require, such as weapons for armies; and they depend on communicative networks to diffuse information, to educate or influence citizens and officials, and to provide relevant scientific knowledge. Similarly, professional organizations rely on the market to mediate between their members and those who use their services or acquire their products, and (at least in some important cases) on states for legal enforcement of the standards set up to exclude outsiders from membership.
Thus the three networks of means fit together into an organized structure of social life, so that those who operate by way of one of them share orientations and expectations with those who function inside another that belong much less to people whose lives unfold largely outside them, such as local chiefs, artisans who make and sell goods inside a relatively closed community, or subsistence farmers. Simmel described one effect of living inside what he called “long chains of purposive action” as an “intellectualization of the will,” a more mediated and abstract style of conceiving of the relations between means and ends than is fostered by an orientation to immediate circumstances, relations, and satisfactions. (What impact this intensified rationalization has on emotional life is an intricate question that will reappear in later discussions.) Although such people retain many important ties to persons and things physically close to them (families, neighbors, lands, towns), their lives do not unfold wholly inside the kinds of communities where all or most significant relations – economic, social, political familial – take place within a bounded and mutually known population.
The ground that bourgeois people in different occupations share through being both limited and empowered by their participation in such networks owes much to the formal similarities between their modes of work. By contrast, the content of what such people do in their daily lives is often diverse and sometimes in conflict. Each network generates a different and self-defining form of social power, and people even quite well furnished with one may be relatively or absolutely deprived of the others (to be sure, the opposite case often obtains too). The continued operation of the whole depends on each network fulfilling its primary function, and thus on each occupational group carrying out its particular tasks and roles, with their diverse orientations and goals. The overlapping of functions that often obtains in practice testifies to the need that every sphere of modern life has for material goods, for organized management of resources, and for knowledge and skill. But each group predominates in the office that corresponds to it, businesspeople in production and exchange, administrators in organizing and managing collective resources, professionals in developing and employing specialized understandings and abilities. The mix of separation and porousness in relations between the groups corresponds to the blend of dependence and interdependence between the functions. Given these connections, it seems reasonable to think that any satisfactory history of “the bourgeoisie” and its role in developing and preserving modern life must simultaneously be a history of the emergence and development of the complex of networks through which all these activities take place. To separate out one species of bourgeois from the others and regard it as the independent foundation on which the whole category rests, or to envision a history of “the bourgeois class” abstracted or removed from the overall configuration of the networks that constitute its frame of existence in particular times and places, is to invite misunderstanding and confusion.
From teleocracy to autonomy
So far I have considered networks of means as structures identifiable inside modern settings, and in relation to a developed form of bourgeois life. But such linkages have a much longer history. Markets, state structures, and webs of cultural interchange were already extensive, if less thickly developed, in the ancient and medieval worlds, and outside of Europe. These older networks, however, commonly had a different form, both in actuality and in the way people imagined them. I propose to designate them as “teleocratic” or “ordained,” to indicate that flows through them were directed by some end outside themselves. They were characteristic of an age or a culture in which social life was thought to be ordered by a transcendent or inherited hierarchy of values and functions. By contrast modern networks may be labeled “autonomous” or “self-constituting”: they operate according to rules, but ones generated – sometimes actually, sometimes only ideally or in imagination – by the interactions that take place within them. They embody the expectation Immanuel Kant famously associated with Enlightenment, that people in the present ought to be their own lawgivers.
Ordained or teleocratic networks possess a real or imagined center that directs the resources that flow through them along some predetermined path; they are regarded as disordered if the power they generate is turned toward goals or purposes that claim independence from their externally given end. If rep
resented visually, such networks would resemble the nineteenth-century French railroad system, with all (or most all) the lines radiating out from Paris. (I shall consider later what it was about French history that stamped such a pattern on its version of what nineteenth-century people saw as a quintessentially modern phenomenon.) By contrast, self-constituting or autonomous networks contain many centers, whose relations are established and regulated by the media that connect them, and which I identified above as money, political legitimacy, and recognized forms of competence or skill. They can be likened visually to the British or German railway systems, with lines running between points of interchange in unpredictable and seemingly chaotic (but hardly ever reasonless) directions. What disorders them is the imposition of some exterior aim or purpose that restricts the uses to which their means can be put. As networks assume a more autonomous character, one of the chief goals of people who operate within them becomes to liberate those means from restrictions so that they can develop unhindered by external constraints.
The medieval Church is an example of a teleocratic network, while the early modern Republic of Letters sought to be an autonomous one. The Church was a far-flung web linking together the religious and intellectual goals and resources of people separated by great distances. Both society and individuals, particularly the clergy whose special professio made them its exemplary members, were able to draw power from it, but on the condition that they remained within the bounds of orthodoxy and agreed to reserve the resources brought together by the network and the energies it generated for its foreordained purpose. Groups deemed to be heretical might make use of means that were part of the official Church, for instance texts or monasteries, pilgrimage sites or bodies of clergy or teachers, but the disorder this was perceived to engender was a candidate for suppression. The Republic of Letters, by contrast, proclaimed the principle of equal access for all those who had some degree of literary or intellectual competence, rejecting (as irrelevant, restrictive, or divisive) religious and ideological criteria both for membership and for judging the uses people made of the assets to which it gave access. The means were valued for whatever contributions to knowledge and understanding they fostered; hence their use was not supposed to be constrained by some set of predetermined ends.10 Given the persisting weight of patronage relations and the ability of prominent individuals to exercise power over cultural production, this description needs to be recognized as an ideal rather than an actual one, but the principle proved capable of maintaining itself against the exceptions.11
Modernity and Bourgeois Life Page 3
