Antibourgeois

Antibourgeois is a term used to describe attitudes, movements, or rhetoric that rejects or critiques bourgeois values and social norms. The word can function as a descriptive label or as a self-identification, depending on context. In political discourse, antibourgeois viewpoints oppose liberal emphasis on private property, market dominance, status distinctions, and conventional family life, and often advocate egalitarian reforms or revolutionary change. In cultural criticism, antibourgeois rhetoric targets what is seen as bourgeois taste and respectability, favoring critique, experimentation, or spontaneity in everyday life.

Historically, antipathy toward the bourgeois has roots in 19th-century socialist and workers’ movements that criticized the capitalist class as exploitative and socially dominant. In the 20th century, anti-bourgeois sentiment resurfaced in avant-garde art and literature, including movements such as Dada and Surrealism, where rejection of bourgeois aesthetics was tied to political or ethical critique. The label can be used both by opponents of capitalism and by artists who describe their work as antibourgeois to signal rupture with middle-class norms.

Contemporary use varies; some see antibourgeois positions as a legitimate critique of inequality and consumer culture, while others warn that the term can function as a blanket stigma that obscures political nuance. In debates, antibourgeois rhetoric often overlaps with anti-capitalist, anti-establishment, or anti-conformist currents, and its meaning shifts with who deploys it and for what ends.

See also: bourgeoisie, anti-capitalism, proletariat, Dada, Surrealism, modernism.