‘Bourgeois’ first appeared in eleventh-century French, as burgeis, to indicate those residents of medieval towns (bourgs) who enjoyed the legal right of being ‘free and exempt from feudal jurisdiction’ (Robert). The juridical sense of the term—from which arose the typically bourgeois idea of liberty as ‘freedom from’—was then joined, near the end of the seventeenth century, by an economic meaning that referred, with the familiar string of negations, to ‘someone who belonged neither to the clergy nor to the nobility, did not work with his hands, and possessed independent means’ (Robert again).
...more
The Bourgeois: Between...
