Bourgeois is associated in the popular consciousness, especially in America, with Marx. But there is also the bourgeois as the enemy of the artists. The capitalist and the philistine bourgeois are supposed to be the same, but Marx presents only the economic side, assuming, without adequate warrant, that it can account for both the moral and esthetic deformities of the bourgeois described by the artists, and for the artists themselves. Doubt that this treatment of the bourgeois and the artist really works is one of the prime motives of those attracted to Nietzsche, whose central theme is the artist. As I have said many times and in many ways, most of the great European novelists and poets of the last two hundred years were men of the Right; and Nietzsche is in that respect merely their complement. For them the problem was in one way or another equality, which has no place for genius. Thus they are the exact opposite of Marx. But somehow he who says he hates the bourgeoisie can be seen to be a friend of the Left. Therefore when the Left got the idea of embracing Nietzsche, it got, along with him, all the authority of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary tradition. Goethe and Flaubert and Yeats hated the bourgeoisie—so Marx was right: these writers simply had not recognized that the bourgeoisie could be overcome by the proletariat. And Nietzsche, taken from the correct angle, can be said to be a proponent of the Revolution. When one reads the early Partisan Review, edited entirely by leftists, one sees its unlimited enthusiasm for Joyce and Proust, whom they were introducing to this country, apparently in the opinion that they represented the art of the socialist future, although these artists thought the future of art lay in the opposite direction.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
(A quotation I didn’t have room to include and contest in my essay on Bloom’s controversial manifesto. I don’t like to quibble with every little thing when I’m writing a book review, since most nonfiction books have something to criticize in every sentence, and nobody likes a pedant. But this passage is exaggerated, unless his definitions of most and great are extremely restricted.
Keats, Shelley, Byron, Browning, and Wilde were not men of the Right, nor was Dickens, nor was Hardy, nor was George Eliot, who wasn’t even a man. Were Hölderlin and Schiller of the Right? Was Tolstoy? Turgenev, Chekhov, and Ibsen certainly weren’t. Joyce called himself a socialist early on and an anarchist later. Woolf was ostensibly an anarcha-feminist, though in reality more the ancestor of today’s professional-class “radlib”—still not on the Right, though. I’m admittedly a little dim on Proust, but I seem to recall he was a Dreyfusard, as was Zola. Mann went from Right to Left. To Kafka these labels hardly apply. Beckett fought for the Resistance. And Nabokov, who was on the lowercase-r American right [the right wing of liberalism] but not the capital-R European Right, discusses the same ambiguity Bloom observes in his Lectures on Literature, specifically his discussion of Madame Bovary:
Unless it simply means townsman, as it often does in French, the term bourgeois as used by Flaubert means “philistine,” people preoccupied with the material side of life and believing only in conventional values. He never uses the word bourgeois with any politico-economic Marxist connotation. Flaubert's bourgeois is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. [...] Let me add for double clarity that Marx would have called Flaubert a bourgeois in the politico-economic sense and Flaubert would have called Marx a bourgeois in the spiritual sense; and both would have been right, since Flaubert was a well-to-do gentleman in physical life and Marx was a philistine in his attitude towards the arts.
After all that, Bloom is certainly correct about the ambiguity exploited by a late-20th-century far left that could no longer believe in the proletariat as the agent of world-historical transformation, and some of my own aforementioned far-left preceptors said much the same in their own bitter laments over the colonization of Marxism by Nietzsche and Heidegger. This passage from Closing is funny and true—
When one talks to Marxists these days and asks them to explain philosophers or artists in terms of objective economic conditions, they smile contemptuously and respond, “That is vulgar Marxism,” as if to ask, “Where have you been for the last seventy-five years?” No one likes to be considered vulgar, so people tend to fall back into embarrassed silence. Vulgar Marxism is, of course, Marxism. Nonvulgar Marxism is Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Heidegger, as well as the host of later Leftists who drank at their trough—such as Lukacs, Kojeve, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre—and hoped to enroll them in the class struggle. To do this, they had to jettison that embarrassing economic determinism.
—but it’s the Marxists’ own fault if they couldn’t provide any richer account of the human being, and both the liberals’ and the Marxists’ fault if they, in denying the claims of art, also deny the polis art’s gift to modernity: a method for satisfying humanity’s transcendental and infernal drives that does not require the apotheosis of church, state, or ethnos. Allan Bloom didn’t quite understand this either, though the other Bloom—I mean Harold—came a lot closer.)
