Nowadays the term “bourgeois philosophy” no doubt sounds an immediate ironic note. It invokes a still polemical, if also a stale and overused characterization of a distinct historical condition, our historical condition, the “modern West.” The phrase suggests that there is a sort of philosophy appropriate to a historical epoch and a kind of society, that pursuing some questions makes sense only under certain historical conditions: a certain level of cultural development or prosperity, a certain sort of economic organization, a certain distribution of social power, a certain relation to religion, and so forth. “Bourgeois” is an adjective that is supposed to help direct us to the specific conditions among the possibilities most relevant for understanding why our philosophy looks the way it does, so different from past versions of our own, and perhaps from anyone else's. Since the term has become a kind of epithet, it also suggests a high-minded defense of a commitment to a value, when that commitment is actually motivated by low-minded interests.

If we were to characterize epochs and societies by reference to “highest values,” then the heart of such a bourgeois philosophy would have to be a philosophy of freedom. This would be a philosophy that explains how it is possible (whether it is possible) that individual subjects could uniquely, qua individuals, direct the course of their own lives, why it has become so important that we seek to achieve this state maximally, consistent with a like liberty for all, what that means, why it is just to call on the coercive force of law to ensure such a possibility (the protection of liberty, the “one natural right”), and so forth.