ABSTRACT
Social thought was dynamic in late medieval and early modern England. At some point, humanist thinking moved beyond seeking the best Commonwealth in purely political terms. This chapter examines the persistence of organic representations of society beyond 1549, but also the proliferating contestation of those ideas. It shows that Thomas Smith was not alone in observing conflicts between economic groups in society, that his rethinking of social relations in the Discourse of the Common Weal, although unpublished until the 1580s, was reproduced by others from the mid-sixteenth century and, specifically, in representations of Elizabethan society by Smith himself, by William Harrison, and by Thomas Wilson. These writers gave new prominence to the possession of wealth as the basic stuff of social relations, rather than function, interdependency, and fixed hierarchy in the body social. In Wilson's case, this new theory was expressed in detailed, numerical terms that were unprecedented in previous social commentary and that anticipated the age of Political Arithmetic.
