The bourgeois is the subject of modernity. As Immanuel Wallerstein puts it: “Hero for some, villain for others, the inspiration or lure for most, he has been the shaper of the present and the destroyer of the past.” Initially designating the inhabitant of the “bourg” (an urban area), the bourgeois designated a new social type, a new class, “free” from the social obligations defining the strict social hierarchy of the feudal political structure. The bourgeois was neither a peasant who worked the land, an aristocratic member of the nobility who owned the land, nor a member of the clergy. The bourgeois constituted an anomaly within the social structure: a “middle-class” whose emerging political power consummated in the 19th century was concomitant with the rise of market society and the new form of economic production, imperial power, and colonial expansion that defined it: in short, capitalism. We cannot conceptualize the bourgeois subject without thinking capitalism.

For Marx, the bourgeois subject has to be understood as a personification of Capital and the social relations it engenders and thereby conceptually determines. As Marx and Engels formulate it in the Communist Manifesto, the bourgeoisie establishes as the sole nexus between human beings “naked self-interest” and “callous ‘cash payment.’” However, this does not mean that capitalism and capitalist society is driven by a psychological motive but that this form of consciousness is itself defined by the social structure that determines it.

In the first volume of Capital, Marx undertakes an effort to understand the structures that define this system of social exchange and the bourgeois subject that is its ideological product. By laying bare the inner structure of the mode of production that defines capitalist society, Marx provides a complete and total critique of this subject that personifies its interest and thus the form of consciousness it embodies. As a critique of classical political economy, Marx’s Capitalis a critique in turn of the form of self-consciousness that defines its historical protagonist.

The seminar will consist of an effort to read Capital, Volume I.