ABSTRACT
The rise of a viable class society depended, more than on anything else, on the extent and speed at which the classes were institutionalized and the institutions learned by experience the sophisticated arts of mutual bargaining. Here, if English class society was unlucky in the economic climate in which it passed through the main stage of institutionalization, it was lucky in institutions which it inherited from the old society. Apart from an array of political, legal and administrative institutions capable in the event of being reformed to meet its needs, it inherited one set of institutions which might have been designed to be the models and mentors of the new class organizations, and to instruct them in the art of non-violent conflict. These were the institutions of sectarian religion.
