Bürgerlichkeit

Bürgerlichkeit is a German sociocultural concept denoting the norms, values, and practices of the bourgeois middle class. It encompasses civility, respect for the rule of law, private property, and self-reliance through education and work. In classical sociology the term describes the civilizational project of modern bourgeois society, organizing public life around rationality, merit, and individual responsibility while maintaining a boundary between private life and the political sphere.

Historically the concept arose with the rise of urban middle classes in 18th- and 19th-century Europe. In German discourse it is linked to Bürgertum and bürgerliche Gesellschaft and to analyses of modernization, industrialization, and nation-building. The notion carries both positive associations—social cohesion, political participation, economic innovation—and critical ambivalence, since it can imply conservative norms and exclusion of non-bourgeois groups.

In contemporary humanities, Bürgerlichkeit is used to examine citizenship, civil society, and liberal-democratic norms. It serves as a tool to discuss everyday life, cultural capital, and the legitimating basis of social hierarchy. Some studies treat it as an aspirational ethos for social respectability; others scrutinize its exclusions, including gender, class, and ethnicity. Thus the term remains a flexible, sometimes contested category in German-speaking scholarship.