The bourgeoisie is the social class that owns the means of production — the equipment, land, and materials needed to produce goods and services. It derives wealth and status from private capital or commercial activity rather than wages.
It includes businessmen, bankers, factory owners, managers, entrepreneurs, merchants, traders, and other professionals and property owners making income outside of salary.
Key Takeaways
- Bourgeoisie: The term dates back centuries but rose to prominence through Marx’s concept of class struggle — a social order dominated by those who own property and the means of production.
- Ruling Class: Marx saw the bourgeoisie as capitalist society’s ruling class, since economic power gives it access to political power.
- Not Always Wealthy: Despite its political and cultural dominance, the bourgeoisie is not necessarily wealthy in every case.
- Class Conflict: Marx viewed the proletariat as inherently in conflict with the bourgeoisie, who exploit workers’ labor while profiting from owning the means of production.
- Beyond Marxism: The term has evolved past strict ownership. Many Francophone countries use “bourgeoisie” to mark stratifications of intergenerational wealth instead.
Definition
According to Karl Marx, the bourgeoisie, also known as the capitalist or ruling class, are those who own the means of production and monopolize wealth, and stand in contrast to the working-class proletariat majority, whose labor-power is exploited by the bourgeoisie majority.
The means of production refers to all of the equipment and materials needed to produce goods and services, apart from labor.
The means of production for wheat, for example, include fields and farm tools. For cotton shirts, they include fabric, sewing machines, and storage space in a factory.
Capital is different. It is the money required to purchase machinery, raw materials, and labor. Marx did not treat it as a direct means of production; some Marxists call it an indirect means of production instead.
The Emergence of the Bourgeoisie
Scholars identify three phases in the bourgeoisie’s development. The first is an ascendant phase from the 18th to early 19th century. The second is a culminating phase from the mid-19th century to World War I. The third is a period of differentiation, dissolution, and rebirth into the late 20th century.
The modern bourgeoisie, which took shape in the 18th and 19th centuries, enveloped several social groups. These included (Siegrist, 2007):
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The older urban bourgeoisie of cities and communes;
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Civil servants of the modern territorial state who were not part of a feudal hierarchy;
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Merchants, bankers, industrial entrepreneurs, and independent artisans who were able to remove themselves from the order of cooperative estates
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Professionals, literati, and artists;
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Enlightened or economically innovative portions of the landholding nobility, as well as non-noble estate owners and agriculturalists; and,
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Participants in freedom movements that were cultural or confessional, liberal or democratic, or regional or national.
According to Siegrist (2007), the bourgeoisie created a common language of communication and symbolism through their collaboration with the monarchs and the state.
The bourgeoisie instituted various reforms and revolutions that imposed freedom of trade, religious freedom, freedom of association, freedom of speech and the press, political participation, and accountability.
The bourgeoisie gathered in circles such as free academies, scientific academies, literary circles, the media, and the reformed institutions of higher education, administration, law, legislation, and government (Siegrist, 2007).
These provided forums for the emerging bourgeoisie to criticize existing conditions, conceive of new social orders, and lay claims to dictating central functions of society.
The Proletariat vs. the Bourgeoisie
The Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat are the two dominant classes in Marxism. Marx believed these two classes had inherently opposed values, which would drive class conflict.
Marx defines these classes by ownership, not income or status. Someone who owns the factory or farm that others work in is bourgeoisie. Those who work for that owner are proletariat instead.
Class Conflict
These are determined by distribution and consumption, which in itself reflects the production and power relations of classes. Thus, the social conditions of bourgeoisie production are defined by bourgeois property. Class, to Marx, is both a theoretical and formal relationship among individuals.
The force that transforms someone’s class membership into a struggle of classes is class interests.
Marx believed that those in similar classes develop interdependence, community, and shared interests around a common income of profit or wages.
To Marx, individuals form classes to the extent that their interests position them in a struggle with the opposite class (Mandel & Mandel, 1979).
Political power follows production. Marx believed that the distribution of political power depends on power over production.
Capital can confer political power. The bourgeois class then uses that power to legitimize and protect its property and social relations.
Class relations are political. The mature capitalist state is primarily concerned with the interests of the bourgeoisie.
The intellectual basis of state rule belongs to the ruling class too. The ideas that justify state power and its distribution are theirs.
In Marx’s view, culture is not neutral. Both intellectual and social culture are constructions that rest on the relationship between owners and non-owners.
Marx believed class division would widen over time. Eventually, the exploited working class’s conditions would deteriorate until the social structure itself collapsed.
He saw this proletarian revolution as wiping away the idea of class entirely.
Political authority would then diminish. Since protecting the bourgeoisie would become unnecessary, the state itself would fade away (Mandel & Mandel, 1979).
Implications in Marxism
Bourgeoisie Culture
Marx traced culture to power. He believed political power arose from the divisions between the bourgeoisie and industrial workers (Mandel & Mandel, 1979).
A society’s culture, he argued, is dominated by the values of the ruling class.
This holds everywhere.
The ruling class imposes its values on every social class, regardless of the social and economic results.
One aspect of bourgeoisie culture has drawn particular criticism: conspicuous consumption.
The petite bourgeoisie’s shopping culture made the sitting room the center of family life, organized around prestige through material display.
The phrase itself did not originate with Marx.
It was coined independently by the economist Thorstein Veblen, who used it to describe a class whose members display wealth to compete for social standing (Veblen, 1899).
An early 19th-century bourgeois house might contain hand-painted porcelain, machine-printed cotton fabrics and wallpaper, and stainless steel.
These goods had real value.
They had practical utility as well as prestige value. By the later 19th century, this shifted toward displaying wealth rather than practical use (Mandel & Mandel, 1979).
Bourgeoisie Values
Max Weber (Swidler, 1973) argued that bourgeois values are grounded in Rationalism.
More modern sociologists see “progressive” middle-class values, such as individualism, autonomy, gender equality, and innovation, as a transposition of Victorian bourgeois values onto the United States.
Siegrist (2007) argues the bourgeoisie improved its chances within a system of material, social, political, and cultural inequality by generalizing its own understanding of law.
It saw itself as opposed to the nobility and clergy. Yet it claimed to represent the general public, valuing achievement and dynamism over birth.
Implications beyond Marxism
Origins and Progressive Role
Marx and Engels traced the bourgeoisie’s roots to medieval Europe.
They believed it arose around the 12th century, within strict city limits (Siegrist, 2007).
Marx’s history saw the bourgeoisie as politically progressive during the 17th and 18th centuries.
It supported constitutional government and natural rights against the divine-right claims nobles had used to justify feudal rule. This was principled, not incidental.
Marx believed the English Civil War, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolutions were each motivated in part by the bourgeoisie’s desire for freedom.
It wanted freedom from feudal and royal intrusion into personal life, commerce, and property ownership.
At the time, the bourgeoisie included the more educated middle class: doctors, lawyers, merchants.
They fought for liberalism. In promoting civil liberties for themselves and for lower social classes, they played a progressive role in Western societies (Siegrist, 2007).
Marxist Ownership vs. Broader Usage
The word bourgeoisie is often used loosely today to suggest middle-class materialism.
Twentieth-century historians used it more precisely, to denote merchants, non-nobles, pensioners, officials, and financiers.
The strict Marxist sense differs. There, the bourgeoisie is defined by ownership, not occupation.
They earn profits by deriving work from workers, while workers sell their labor for a wage.
Ownership alone is not quite enough, either. Managers of the state and landlords are not part of the bourgeoisie in this strict sense.
Capitalists must be actively involved in accumulating capital. They use money to organize the means of production, and to employ and profit from workers’ labor.
Income and lifestyle are not the test here. Ownership is. That single criterion still does the real work of sorting who counts as bourgeoisie in the strict sense.
Haute and Petite Bourgeoisie
By the end of the Industrial Revolution, Marx saw the bourgeoisie’s expansion causing stratification by business activity and economic function.
This birthed the haute and petite bourgeoisie. The haute bourgeoisie consisted of bankers and industrialists.
The petite bourgeoisie was tradesmen and white-collar workers instead.
A blacksmith who owns his own shop and tools, for example, may be part of the petite bourgeoisie.
This applies especially while he still works in that shop, contributing his own labor to his products directly.
Scale mattered less than ownership. Ownership still mattered most, more than the scale of the operation.
By the end of the 19th century, the haute bourgeoisie had ascended to society’s upper ranks.
Advancing technology occasionally let working-class individuals rise into the bourgeoisie’s lower strata, though this remained uncommon overall (Siegrist, 2007).
Examples
The bourgeoisie, both in the Marxist sense and elsewhere, encompasses a wide array of professions and social statuses. On a broad level, Marx divided his bourgeoisie into the haute, or high bourgeoisie and the petite, or small bourgeoisie. Scholars have made various distinctions between various layers of class status within the bourgeoisie.
French Bourgeoisie
For example, in many Francophone countries, the bourgeoisie is considered to consist of five evolving social layers: the petite, moyenne, grande, haute, and ancienne bourgeoisie.
Petite bourgeoisie, are the equivalent to what many would call the modern-day lower middle class — a social class between the middle and lower classes.
The moyenne, or middle bourgeoisie, contains people who have solid incomes and assets but not the historical legacy of those whose assets have been established intergenerationally. This is equivalent to the British and American upper-middle classes.
The grande, or great bourgeoisie, are families that have been bourgeois for several generations. These families may intermarry with aristocracy and are often known in the city where they reside and may have contributed to a region’s history.
The haute bourgeoisie is older still. Its families’ intergenerational wealth is often contrasted with that of the nouveau riche.
Finally, the ancienne (old) bourgeoisie is a newer term, first coined by Rémond, that denotes those who lie between the aristocracy and the middle class. Often, these families acquired their status during the “Ancien Régime,” and have held onto it for 400 or 500 years (Rémond, 2013).
The Educated vs. Capitalist Bourgeoisie
Some scholars draw a further line. They separate bourgeoisie by education from bourgeoisie by wealth alone. In a strict Marxist sense, though, status still depends on ownership of the means of production, not income.
The most notable example of the educated bourgeoisie is the intelligentsia. These are highly educated people. They remain engaged in personal intellectual pursuits throughout their lives — academics, artists, writers, and journalists among them.
They are not always wealthy. Yet they may view themselves as bourgeoisie through their connections to prestigious institutions and spheres of intellectual influence.
Entrepreneurs and capitalists, by contrast, are bourgeoisie in the classic Marxist sense. This class acquires the means of production, then gains wealth by exploiting workers — compensating them less than the value of the goods they produce (Sagarra, 2017).
Old Money vs. New Money
A separate American distinction exists too. It runs alongside these European schemas: the difference between old money and new money.
Old money families derive their wealth mainly from inheritance, not their own labor.
Standing matters too. Their standing rests as much on an exclusive social infrastructure as on the wealth itself.
This means elite schooling, restricted clubs, and intermarriage within a small circle (Domhoff, 1974; Ostrander, 1984).
New money is different.
It is wealth its holder personally earned within their own lifetime: entrepreneurs, sports stars, technology founders.
It typically arrives without automatic access to old money’s dense social infrastructure. This holds even when the sums involved are far larger.
This distinction matters. It shows that, even within Marx’s strict ownership criterion, family tenure shapes cohesion as much as wealth size does.
What is the Difference between Bourgeois and Bourgeoisie?
Bourgeoisie is a word derived from French that functions as a noun. It refers to a society’s middle class — generally described as the group between the affluent upper class and the poor working class (writingexplained.org). The distinction matters.
Bourgeois is also a French loanword that refers to the middle class. Unlike bourgeoisie, however, it can also refer to an individual belonging to the middle class, and be employed as an adjective to denote traits of the middle class.
The Power Elite: The Bourgeoisie Beyond Marxism
Marx’s account of the bourgeoisie asked a simple question: who owns the factories, land, and capital?
Twentieth-century American sociology asked a related but different question. Who actually occupies the command posts of a modern society’s major institutions? And how unified is that group?
This tradition runs from C. Wright Mills’s power elite through G. William Domhoff’s ruling class to studies of interlocking corporate boards.
Method differs from Marx here.
It does not use Marx’s method. Yet it converges on Marx’s central claim: economic ownership tends to convert into political power.
Mills’s Power Elite
Aim: to identify who occupied the command posts of mid-20th-century America’s three major hierarchies: corporations, government, and the military.
Mills also tested whether power was really as dispersed among competing groups as many assumed.
Few had tested this directly.
Method: Mills tracked who held the top posts. He combined this with data on shared origins and elite schooling.
He also tracked how often the same people moved between boardrooms, cabinet posts, and military command (Mills, 1956).
The overlap was striking.
Findings: a small group ran everything. It occupied all three command posts, shared common origins, and often swapped between them.
Below it sat a “middle level of power,” made up of Congress and interest groups.
Below that sat a largely passive public.
Conclusion: mid-20th-century America was not the pluralist democracy many assumed, Mills concluded.
Its most consequential decisions were made by a small, self-perpetuating elite. Common origin and institutional interlock bound it together, not formal conspiracy.
Evaluation: Mills’s study anticipated decades of later interlocking-directorate research.
Critics counter that he showed the elite occupied powerful positions, without proving it acted in coordinated fashion on specific decisions.
Domhoff’s Ruling Class
G. William Domhoff extended Mills’s argument. He used more systematic evidence of institutional interlock.
Domhoff coined the term “ruling class” for the “corporate rich”: those who own or control large income-producing property.
He put this group at under one percent of the U.S. population (Domhoff, 2002).
Domhoff traced three mechanisms through which this group converts wealth into political power.
Money, in short, buys access.
It finances the campaigns of favored candidates. It participates in the special-interest process to secure tax breaks and favorable rulings.
And it gains formal access to policy-making through appointment to government advisory committees (Domhoff, 2002).
Domhoff studied exclusive retreats too, such as California’s Bohemian Grove.
This belongs to the same argument. Informal social settings, not only formal institutions, matter here.
They are where a competitive capitalist class builds the shared trust it needs.
Trust matters as much as money. That trust lets it act with some unity when its interests are at stake (Domhoff, 1974).
Diversification of the Power Elite
Zweigenhaft and Domhoff’s (1998) study asked a further question.
Had the power elite’s membership changed as movements for racial and gender equality opened doors once closed outright?
Change was real.
Women and members of racial and religious minorities had genuinely entered the power elite in measurable numbers.
More Black executives sat on the boards of the largest corporations. Presidential cabinets grew more diverse too.
Military leadership was no longer filled solely by white men.
Yet the elite’s overwhelming majority remained white, wealthy, Christian, and male.
Those who entered it typically did so by adopting its existing values, rather than changing them (Zweigenhaft & Domhoff, 1998).
This matters for how the bourgeoisie should be understood today. The class can diversify by demographic measures without dissolving its underlying concentration of ownership.
Critical Evaluation
The concept of the bourgeoisie has real durability as an analytic tool.
The idea is simple.
A single criterion, ownership of the means of production, organizes a wide range of facts about wealth, political access, and cultural influence.
This has held across more than two centuries of capitalist development. It has also attracted sustained, well-founded criticism.
The Ownership Criterion Is Harder to Apply Today
Marx wrote at a time when a factory typically had a small number of identifiable owners.
Ownership was easy to see then.
In a modern public company, shares are often held indirectly by millions of pension savers and index-fund investors.
The people who actually run the company day to day, its salaried executives and managers, often own only a small fraction of its equity themselves.
Ownership had thinned out.
Berle and Means’s (1932) landmark study of America’s largest corporations documented this “managerial revolution” directly.
As share ownership spread among many small shareholders, effective control passed from the dispersed legal owners into the hands of salaried managers.
Ownership and control split apart.
Marxist responses argue the separation is less complete than it looks.
Managers are themselves recruited disproportionately from wealthy backgrounds, and compensated substantially in company equity.
So managerial control functions as an agent of capitalist ownership, the argument goes, rather than a genuine rival to it.
Does the Ruling Class Act as One?
Critics of the Mills-Domhoff tradition argue that identifying people who occupy powerful positions is not the same thing.
It is not the same as showing that they act as a unified political actor.
Robert Dahl’s (1961) influential study of decision-making in New Haven, Connecticut, made this case directly.
Dahl looked closely.
Examining several contested local policy decisions, he found that different, largely non-overlapping groups tended to prevail on different issues.
One coalition dominated urban-redevelopment decisions. A different one dominated public-education decisions.
No single elite dictated outcomes across the board, Dahl concluded.
Domhoff has replied that Dahl’s method misses a subtler form of power.
A ruling class can keep its own core interests off the political agenda altogether.
Nothing to see, nothing to vote on. Those interests are then never seriously contested in the first place.
The Term’s Popular Drift
Everyday usage of “bourgeois” has drifted from Marx’s strict criterion.
It increasingly denotes lifestyle, taste, and inherited social status, rather than ownership and active capital accumulation.
This drift makes the term rhetorically powerful.
Almost anyone can be accused of “bourgeois” taste or values.
But it is analytically looser than Marx’s original concept.
Two other traditions capture this looseness better than Marx’s binary criterion does.
Max Weber’s multidimensional account of class treats it as a graded matter of market position.
That fits the bourgeoisie’s internal layers, haute versus petite, old money versus new money, more naturally than one ownership line can.
The Italian theorist Gaetano Mosca offered a different challenge.
He argued that every society is governed by a small organized minority.
Historical change, on this view, typically replaces one elite with another, rather than abolishing elite rule (Mosca, 1939).
Contemporary Research
The strongest recent test of Marx’s core claim comes from a large dataset.
It combines corporate boards, individual wealth, and political participation across almost an entire national population.
Few datasets are this complete.
Aim: Saga (2025) tested whether the capitalist class still exercises organized political influence.
The study also asked whether directors and wealthy owners use the same strategies to do so, despite fragmented corporate networks and dispersed share ownership.
This had never been tested directly.
Method: the study combined data on the boards of Norway’s 500 largest companies with a “rich list” of its 360 wealthiest individuals.
It used network mapping and regression modeling to compare political activity: advisory boards, business associations, and political donations (Saga, 2025).
Findings: the two groups split the work.
Interlocked directors, an “inner circle” of about five percent of all directors studied, were 9 to 10 percentage points more likely to sit on advisory boards and business associations.
Money was their channel instead.
Wealthy owners, instead, gave roughly 73 percent of all corporate political donations.
Both groups backed the same right-of-centre parties.
The pattern held.
Conclusion: a more fragmented corporate elite has not lost its capacity for coordinated influence.
Different fractions of the capitalist class specialized in complementary channels instead (Saga, 2025).
Nothing was actually lost.
Evaluation: built on close to whole-population data for an entire country, this sits well up the evidence hierarchy.
Its main limit is that Norway’s economy is small, egalitarian, and unusually transparent.
Elsewhere, the split may differ. The same division of labor may look different in a larger, less transparent economy.
This finding sits alongside longer-running evidence on wealth concentration itself.
Saez and Zucman (2016) combined U.S. income-tax records with national-accounts data to estimate wealth holdings back to 1913.
That is far longer than most household surveys allow.
They found a pronounced U-shaped pattern.
The shape was clear.
Wealth concentration at the very top was high in the early 20th century.
It then fell steadily until the late 1970s.
Then it rose again, continuously and steeply.
The wealth share held by the top 0.1 percent of American households climbed from roughly 7 percent in 1979 to around 22 percent by 2012.
That approaches levels last seen before the Great Depression (Saez & Zucman, 2016).
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