Social Classes
It is hard to get any agreement on the precise meaning of the term “social class”. In everyday life, people tend to have a different approach to those they consider their equals from that which they assume with people they consider higher or lower than themselves in the social scale. The criteria we use to “place” a new acquaintance, however, are a complex mixture of factors. Dress, way of speaking, area of residence in a given city or province, education and manners all play a part.
In ancient civilizations, the Sumerian, for example, which flourished in the lower Euphrates valley from 5000 to 2000 B. C., social differences were based on birth, status or rank, rather than on wealth. Four main classes were recognized. These were the rulers, the priestly administrators, the freemen （such as craftsmen, merchants or farmers） and the slaves.
In Greece, after the sixth century B.C., there was a growing conflict between the peasants and the landed aristocrats（贵族）, and a gradual decrease in the power of the aristocracy when a kind of “middle class” of traders and skilled workers grew up. The population of Athens, for example, was divided into three main classes which were politically and legally distinct. About one-third of the total were slaves, who did not count politically at all, a fact often forgotten by those who praise Athens as the nursery of democracy. The next main group consisted of resident foreigners, the “metics”, who were freemen, though they too were allowed no share in political life. The third group was the powerful body of “citizens”, who were themselves divided into sub-classes.
In ancient Rome, too, a similar struggle between the plebs, or working people, and the landed families was a recurrent feature of social life.
The medieval feudal system, which flourished in Europe from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, gave rise to a comparatively simple system based on birth. Under the king there were two main classes—lords and “vassals”, the latter with many subdivisions. The vassal owed the lord fidelity（忠诚）, obedience and aid, especially in the form of military service. The lord in return owed his vassal protection and an assured livelihood.
In the later Middle Ages, however, the development of a money economy and the growth of cities and trade led to the rise of class, the “burghers” or city merchants and mayors. These were the predecessors（前身）of the modern middle classes. Gradually high office and occupation assumed importance in determining social position, as it became more and more possible for a person born to one station in life to more to another. This change affected towns more than the country areas, where remnants of feudalism lasted much longer.
With the break-up of the feudal economy, the increasing division of labour, and the growing power of the town burghers, the commercial and professional middle class became more and more important in Europe, and the older privileged class, the landed aristocracy, began to lose some of its power.
In the eighteenth-century one of the first modern economists, Adam Smith, thought that the “whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country” provided revenue to “three different orders of people: those who live by rent, those who live by wages, and those who live by profit”. Each successive stage of the industrial revolution, however, made the social structure more complicated.
Many intermediate groups grew up during the nineteenth-century between the upper middle class and the working class. There were small-scale industrialists as well as large ones, small shopkeepers and tradesmen, officials and salaried employees, skilled and un-skilled workers, and professional men such as doctors and teachers. Farmers and peasants continued in all countries as independent groups.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the possession of wealth inevitably affected a person’s social position. Intelligent industrialists with initiative made fortunes by their working-class parents. But they lacked the social training of the upper class, who despised them as the “new rich”.
They often sent their sons and daughters to special schools to acquire social training. Here their children mixed with the children of the upper classes, were accepted by them, and very often found marriage partners from among them. In the same way, a thrifty（节俭的）, hardworking labourer, though not clever himself, might save for his son enough to pay for an extended secondary school education in the hope that they would move into a “white-collar” occupation, carrying with it a higher salary and a move up in the social scale.
The tendency to move down in social class is less obvious, for a claim to an aristocratic birth, especially in Europe, has always carried a certain distinction, and people have made tremendous efforts to obtain for their children the kind of opportunities they had for themselves. In the twentieth century the increased taxation of higher incomes, the growth of the social service development of educational opportunity have considerably altered the social outlook. The upper classes no longer are the sole, or even the main possessors of wealth, power and education, though inherited social positions still carries considerable prestige.
Many people today are hostile towards class distinctions and privileges and hope to achieve a classless society. The trouble is that as one inequality is removed, another tends to take its place, and the best that has so far been attempted is a society in which distinctions are elastic（可变的）and in which every member has fair opportunities for making the best of his abilities.
Decide which answer best completes the following statements according to the information in the passage.
1. We“place”people in society in relation to ourselves（）.
