Barthes, Moretti, and the no-name ‘bourgeois.’ Notes on two ‘critical intellectuals.’ Franco Moretti and Roland Barthes have always been critical intellectuals. Their interest in literature has always been more than pathos for a summa of good & beautiful, human, eternal truths: a means of expanding and deepening knowledge of dialectic human truth as revealed within history. They have focused on a few seminal topics and principles. In the following article, we want to draw attention to one of those topics – the “bourgeois” – and on some methodological principles: a historical and sociological reading of literary texts stemming from the importance given to the nineteenth century as the reverse point of European modernity and the moralities one can draw out of considering the relationship between literary style and social realities (sort of materialist formalism). It will be no wonder that both theoreticians focus, at a given moment, on the idea of neutral as a mode of existence of (or out of) the “bourgeois” life. Literature would be, for Moretti and Barthes, not the place meant for power production (through hierarchy building), but one of the places in which human societies reveal to themselves.