ABSTRACT
Passages 1.1, 1.9 and 1.10 in this section provide accounts of the ‘traditional’ social order: the other passages discuss the relation between that order and the new middle classes. Passage 1.1, from Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks, together with passage 5.2 from the same source, describes a natural hierarchy in society and defines the duties of those within it. In passage 1.9 Bolingbroke takes this ‘natural’ hierarchy as an ideal, and uses it as the basis for a critique of the contemporary establishment. Passage 1.10 presents a later Tory description of the order of society, and this has been discussed in the introduction.
