petty bourgeois

noun

1. petit bourgeois.

Word History and Origins

Origin of petty bourgeois¹

First recorded in 1885–90

Example Sentences

“What they had hoped for themselves and their petty bourgeois dreams — they’re not that different from ours at all,” he says.

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Nietzsche's own petty bourgeois resentment of the people, which was the basis of his rejection of the modern state — it allows people to vote and to form unions, compounding the error of Christianity, which allows everyone a soul of equal value to God — is a case in point.

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Leftists in the past might have been slandered as "petty bourgeois" or "revisionists"; these days, calling someone a "neoliberal" is fighting words.

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“Petty bourgeois,” she corrected him.

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Kierkegaard extrapolated a spiritual failing from that class position: “Devoid of imagination, as the petty bourgeois always is, he lives within a certain orbit of trivial experience as to how things come about, what is possible, what usually happens, no matter whether he is a tapster or a prime minister.”

Read more on New York Times