Love Is a Bourgeois Virtue

One can't help but admire the cleverness and artistry of the Pet Shop Boys.

"Love Is a Bourgeois Construct" is a spectacular title, dripping with the sort of cynical jargon one picks up from the more detached corners of the academy. But the song is far more interesting than its title suggests. It is a perfect, if perhaps unintentional, illustration of the very virtues it purports to dismiss. Here’s an analysis of the song synthesizing it through Deirdre McCloskey’s work on Bourgeois virtues.

The singer, reeling from a lost love, tells us he's "hanging out with academic boys" and has concluded that love is merely a "convenient belief," a social artifice to prop up a system. To shield himself from the very real, very un-constructed pain in his heart, he decides to embrace what he thinks is the bourgeois life: getting a job, being busy, focusing on the practical. He believes he is trading the grand passion of Love for the cold calculation of Prudence.

And this is where the song’s delicious irony lies! The poor man gets the bourgeois character entirely wrong. He thinks it is all about Prudence alone, about a chilly, instrumental rationality. But that is a caricature. The bourgeois life, the life of innovation, trade, and betterment that created the modern world and its wonders, including the synthesizers used to make this very record, is built upon a whole set of virtues.

Love: The entire song is animated by the loss of Love. The narrator’s pain is the ghost at the feast, the proof that what he felt was no mere "construct," but a profound human connection. The soaring, almost ecclesiastical music by Mr. Nyman that underpins the track betrays him; it is the sound of a heart that feels deeply, a heart capable of the very Love he now tries to intellectualize away. A true bourgeois loves—his spouse, his work, his community, his God. To deny that is to deny the engine of his life.

Faith and Hope: What does our narrator do in his despair? He doesn't give up. He declares, "I'm looking for a job... I'll be the epicenter of a busy life." This is not cynicism; it is the bourgeois virtue of Hope in action, a belief in a better future, a plan to move forward. It requires Faith: faith in the project of his own life, faith that his efforts will lead to something worthwhile. He is not retreating from the world; he is re-engaging with it on new terms. This is the spirit of the entrepreneur, the merchant, the builder.

Courage: It takes immense Courage to rebuild a life after a devastating emotional loss. This is not the flashy, aristocratic courage of the battlefield, but the steady, persistent, and far more consequential courage of the bourgeoisie: the courage to face uncertainty, to risk one's capital (in this case, emotional capital), and to start anew.

Prudence, Justice, and Temperance: Yes, he is exercising Prudence by seeking work and stability. But this is balanced by the other virtues. He seeks to participate in the market, which, at its best, is a sphere of Justice and of fair dealing and mutual benefit. And his turn to work is an act of Temperance, channeling his grief into productive activity rather than mere dissipation.

So, you see, the narrator is mistaken. He believes he is casting off love to become a creature of the bourgeoisie, when in fact he is simply rebalancing his own, very bourgeois, virtues. He is using Hope, Faith, and Courage to recover from a wound to his Love.

The song is not a successful critique of the bourgeois heart. It is a poignant portrait of it. It shows a modern man, wounded in love, turning to the other virtues of the marketplace and civil society not to extinguish his humanity, but to save it. He thinks he is becoming a cold capitalist cliché, but he is actually demonstrating the resilience, depth, and rich emotional grammar of the bourgeois soul. It's a marvelous, classic tale of loss and recovery, spun with a contemporary, electronic sheen. A triumph, really.