ABSTRACT
Not that the leaders and spokesmen invented the ideals and imposed them on their followers. For one thing, they were at least as much chosen by the class as the class by them: they ‘spoke to their condition’, and when they did not were rejected. For another, the ideals of all the major classes had their origins deep in the old society, and welled up to the surface when the old ground was broken up. There was in each enough nostalgia for certain aspects of the old social structure to ease the transition to the new. In other words, the new class ideals were a transmutation of older elements in the heat generated by class conflict. As such they were not the novel creation of any one man or small band of leaders, but the spontaneous response of large social groups to the release of deep and long suppressed yearnings which had been latent in the old society.
