Bougeois?

I am reading, with mostly positive feeling but also with some reservations, Deirdre McCloskey's The Bourgeois Virtues. It's a book that has long needed to be written and I commend her not only for doing it but for having the courage to tackle the project.

One of my reservations concerns McCloskey's definition of 'bourgeois":

... city dweller practicing an honoured profession or owning a business or functionning at a managerial level in someone else's enterprise, including governmental and non-profit enterprises.

For starters I'd note that Elinor Dashwood would not make the cut under this definition; neither she nor her parents had to work for a living and she does not live in a city. I don't think any definition of bourgeois that can't accommodate Elinor Dashwood is worth having.

I also wonder about "city dweller". The dwellers of some cities, I am thinking of really big cities and cities where governments or universities are the prime employers, are often characterized by their rejection of bourgeois virtue. More generally, the sense of shared public goods in some cities tends to overwhelm qualities of independence and self reliance that are, I'd argue, an essential part of bourgeois virtue.

Picking up from that last point, I'm not at all sure that government and non-profit employees can be counted on to maintain and uphold the bourgeois virtues. Here in Quebec in the 19th century there was a situation where the private sector bourgeoisie was so culturally dominated by people with appointed positions in government and the church that bourgeois virtues were undermined. This had very negative effects on the culture at large that the province still struggles with today.

You could argue that we are in considerable danger of seeing a similar misfortune hit the United States, especially some of the blue states.