ABSTRACT
Like most of the rest of Europe in the early modern period, Germany was a ‘society of orders’ (Ständegesellschaft) – a society, that is, in which the vast majority of the population belonged to groups differentiated from each other by sharply drawn legal and social criteria and organized in a hierarchy of prestige. The circumstances of birth, family and occupation (and inveteracy of one or both), education and political function, among other things, determined the individual’s place in the social order, but almost always as a member of a group with recognizably similar characteristics. Identification with a group was important not only to the individual, who could scarcely locate himself in society without it, but also to government and to other groups, which essentially could not deal with individuals except as parts of the larger corporations which represented them. And while both upward and downward mobility was possible for individuals, a permanent hierarchy of social strata was considered part of a natural and divinely ordained order which defined both rights and duties for all and thus preserved social peace and equilibrium. Not the least of the functions of government at all levels was therefore to police the barriers which separated not only whole orders or estates from one another, but also the very important secondary stratification within those orders.
