|
|
Article: Class, Status, and Order
- Article from:
- Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
CLASS, STATUS, AND ORDER
CLASS, STATUS, AND ORDER.
All human societies require systems of classification. These systems straddle the imagined boundary between the ideal and the real, creating a standard by which society can assess, judge, and, if necessary, punish. Early mod
ern Europeans inherited from their medieval ancestors a system of classification called the society of orders, yet they lived in a world increasingly structured by economic status, which modern societies have termed a society of classes. Historians long accepted three simple propositions about European social classification: The Middle Ages had a society of orders; the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had a ...