ABSTRACT
The theme declares or implies that social class is bad for society: bad for democracy, for culture, and for personality. Pride of social class has been immemorially one of the most effective barriers against the spread of political demagogism, the lure of the charismatic power-seeker, and the inroads of mindless bureaucracy. Despite the ideology of democratic equalitarianism, despite what Tocqueville and Bryce had written about the tenuous character of class lines in the United States, social class, even as recently as 1910, was an understood reality. Consider for a moment a possible analogy to our preoccupation with social class in the United States: the kinship structure known as the kindred. In France and on the Continent in general, social classes of the older order had been more nearly of the nature of estates—bounded, reinforced, and maintained by laws of the realm.
