Social classes ( part 1 - part 2 )

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Social classes (part I)

It is hard to get any agreement on the precise meaning of the

term ‘social class’. In everyday life, people tend to have a different

approach to those they consider their equals from

that which they assume with people they consider higher

or lower than themselves in the social scale. The criteria we use

to 'place' a new acquaintance, however, are a complex mixture of factors. Dress, way of

speaking, area of residence in a given city or province, education and manners all play a

part.

In ancient civilizations, the Sumerian, for example, which flourished in the lower Euphrates

valley from 2000 to 5000 B.C. social differences were based on

birth, status or rank, rather than on wealth. Four main classes were recognized. These were

the rulers, the priestly administrators, the freemen (such as craftsmen, merchants or

farmers) and the slaves.

In Greece, after the sixth-century B.C., there was a growing conflict between the peasants

and the landed aristocrats* and a gradual decrease in the power of the aristocracy when

a kind of ‘middle class’ of traders and skilled

workers grew up. The population of Athens, for example, was divided into

three main classes which were politically and legally distinct. About

one-third of the total were slaves, who did not count

politically at all, a fact often forgotten by those who praise Athens as the nursery of

democracy. The next main group consisted of resident foreigners,

the, ‘me tics’ who were freemen, though they too were allowed no share in political life.

The third group was the powerful body of ‘citizens’, who were themselves divided into sub-

classes.

In ancient Rome, too, a similar struggle between the plebs, or working people, and the

landed families was a recurrent feature of social life.


The medieval feudal system, which flourished in Europe from the ninth to the thirteenth

centuries, gave rise to a comparatively simple system based on

birth. Under the king there were two main classes - lords and 'vassals', the latter with many

subdivisions. The vassal owed the lord fidelity, obedience and aid, especially in the form of

military service. The lord in return owed his vassal protection and

an assured livelihood.

In the later Middle Ages, however, the development of a money economy and the growth of

cities and trade led to the rise of another class, the ‘burghers’ or city merchants and

mayors. These were the predecessors of the modern middle classes.

Gradually high office and occupation assumed importance in determining social position, as

it became more and more possible for a person born to one station in life to move to

another. This change affected the towns more than the country areas, where

remnants of feudalism lasted much longer.

With the break-up of the feudal economy, the increasing division of labor, and the growing

power of the town burghers, the commercial and professional middle class became more and

more important in Europe, and the older privileged class, the landed aristocracy, began to

lose some of its power.

Social classes (part 2)

In the eighteenth-century one of the first modern economists, Adam Smith, thought that

the ‘whole annual produce of the land and labor of every country’ provided revenue to ‘three

different orders of people: those who live by rent, those who live by wages, and those who

live by profit’. Each successive stage of the industrial revolution, however, made the social

structure more complicated.

Many intermediate groups grew up during the nineteenth-century

between the upper middle class and the working class. There were small¬ scale industrialists

as well as large ones, small shopkeepers and tradesmen, officials and salaried employees,

skilled and unskilled workers, and professional men such as doctors

and teachers. Farmers and peasants continued in all countries as independent groups.

In spite of this development, one of the most famous writers on

social class in the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, thought that there was a tendency for

society to split up into huge class camps, the bourgeoisie (the

capitalists) and the proletariat (the workers). Influential as was Marx's theory of social

class, it was much over-simplified. The social make-up of modern

societies is much more complex than he suggested.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the possession of wealth inevitably

affected a person's social position. Intelligent industrialists with initiative made fortunes by

their wits which lifted them into an eco¬nomic group far higher than that of

their working-class parents. But they lacked the social training of the upper class,

who despised them as the ‘new rich’.

They often sent their sons and daughters to special schools to acquire social training. Here

their children mixed with the children of the upper classes, were accepted by them, and

very often found marriage partners from among them. In the same way

, a thrifty, hardworking laborer, though not clever himself,

might save for his son enough to pay for an extended secondary

school education in the hope that he would move into a ‘white-

collar’ occupation, carrying with it a higher salary and a move up in

the social scale.

The tendency to move down in social class is less obvious, for a

claim to an aristocratic birth, especially in Europe, has always carried a certain distinction,

and people have made tremendous efforts to obtain for their children the kind of

opportunities they had for themselves.

In the twentieth century the increased taxation of higher incomes, the growth of the social

services, and the wider development of educational opportunity have considerably altered

the social outlook. The upper classes no longer are the sole, or even the main possessors

of wealth, power and education, though inherited social position still carries consider¬able

prestige.

Many people today are hostile towards class distinctions and privileges and hope

to achieve a classless society. The trouble is that as one inequality is removed, another

tends to take its place, and the best that has so far been attempted is a society in which

distinctions are elastic and in which every member has fair opportunities for making the

best of his abilities

kaynak : englishoffice

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