SOURCE: Grigg, John. “A Class Performance.” Spectator 280, no. 8863 (20 June 1998): 32–33.

In the following review, Grigg offers a mixed assessment of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume V: Pleasure Wars.

There are few sillier notions than that the bourgeoisie is a bastion of philistinism and the supreme obstacle to human progress. Anyone who looks at the evidence can see that the idea is absurd. The word bourgeois is linked, etymologically, with the words city and civilisation, and it is no coincidence that in modern times the advance of humanity has owed far more to the middling sort of people—citizens—than to monarchs, patricians or proletarians. Of course many bourgeois are philistine and resistant to change, because originality and innovation will always be largely confined to an elite. But for at least two centuries the bourgeoisie has been the dynamic element in society and the principal source of creative...