Sublime

Modern society is without any concept of dignity, worth, or regard. Today the only thing which sets one person apart from another is his or her degree of fame.

Observers who had previously considered the modes of subsistence and division of labour in North American societies to be trivial matters, or of at best secondary importance, now began assuming that they were the only thing that really mattered. Everyone was to be sorted along the same grand evolutionary ladder, depending on their primary mode of a

In 1867, E. L. Godkin produced an explanation of why America lacked the intense class consciousness of Europe that probably remains true to this day: “The social line between the laborer and the capitalist here is very faintly drawn. Most successful employers of labor have begun by being laborers themselves; most laborers … hope to become employers

Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson notes, up to 25 percent of inner-city, low-income neighborhoods are comprised of “disconnected” youth who are neither in school nor working.

Following various anthropologists, he plots the all-important sense of ‘honour’ and ‘shame’, which function as basic and pivotal values, determining not least the expectations of gender roles. Following Lenski, he suggests that the aristocratic classes and their retainers formed about 10% of the population, with the rest being peasants and artisans

Where once hoopers and wainwrights and seamstresses saw themselves as heirs to a proud tradition, each with its secret knowledge, the new bureaucratically organized corporations and their “scientific management” sought as far as possible to literally turn workers into extensions of the machinery, their every move predetermined by someone else.

First, he and Thatcher were what sociologists called weak ties.

The treatment of labour as a calling became as characteristic of the modern worker as the corresponding attitude toward acquisition of the business man.