petty bourgeois

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

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.

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

“Petty bourgeois,” she corrected him.

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.”