Le petit bourgeois gentilhomme
Alain Accardo
Notice anglaise
The Lower Middle-Class Gentleman
On the Middle Classes’ Pretensions to Hegemony
A new updated edition with supplementary material
The immense majority seem to be spontaneously united in a culture where marketing for realisable desires has only one aim in mind, that of giving oneself pleasure, to the exclusion of all else. In other words, the capitalist system is not simply functioning by exploitation and oppression but also through the support of most of the exploited for the very system that exploits, despoils and oppresses them. It functions therefore through psychological and moral alienation, nourished by the hope – mostly fallacious – of personal success. Our battles should not merely be waged on the political and economic level, but need to be accompanied by another equally vital combat, where what is at stake is individual subjectivity – and each individual must fight to win it back for him or herself. This work could be called “socio-analytic”, in the sense that it aims to give us a full, up-to-date understanding of what might be called the “social unawareness” our socialisation process has assimilated, and that now conditions such spontaneous support of the established order.
Initially published in 2003 by Editions Labor (Brussels), this book is a continuation of the author’s thinking initially expressed in De notre servitude involontaire / On Our Involuntary Servitude (Agone, 2001), and his preface, “La Colère du juste / The Anger of the Just”, to the book by Libertad, Le Culte de la charogne / The Cult of Decay (Agone, 2006), an analysis of the ambiguous central role of the middle classes in capitalist democracies.
Sociologist Alain Accardo has published, amongst other works, Introduction à une sociologie critique / Introduction to a Critical Sociology (Agone, 2006) and Journalistes précaires, journalistes au quotidien / The Precarity of Journalists: Their Day-to-Day Lives (Agone, 2007).
Published: 17/04/10 – Public Price 13 euros – 160 Pages – ISBN : 978–2–7489–0102–3