Concept

Upper class

Overview

Upper class in modern societies is the social class composed of people who hold the highest social status. Usually, these are the wealthiest members of class society, and wield the greatest political power. According to this view, the upper class is generally distinguished by immense wealth which is passed on from generation to generation. Prior to the 20th century, the emphasis was on aristocracy, which emphasized generations of inherited noble status, not just recent wealth.

Because the upper classes of a society may no longer rule the society in which they are living, they are often referred to as the old upper classes, and they are often culturally distinct from the newly rich middle classes that tend to dominate public life in modern social democracies. According to the latter view held by the traditional upper classes, no amount of individual wealth or fame would make a person from an undistinguished background into a member of the upper class as one must be born into a family of that class and raised in a particular manner to understand and share upper class values, traditions, and cultural norms. The term is often used in conjunction with terms like upper-middle class, middle class, and working class as part of a model of social stratification.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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1. The Senior, while in Wittenberg, had protected the one hundred and eighty Academic Freedoms,--so many of them has Petrus Rebuffus summed up,[35]--against prescription, and lost none except his moral one, of which truly a man, even in a convent, can seldom make much. This gave our Quintus courage to relate certain pleasant somersets of his own, which at Leipzig, under the Incubus-pressure of poverty, he had contrived…

   Thomas Carlyle, Translations from the German

   States what Upper class is; names Upper class.

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2. Lastly, there was the great class of the small farmers, the peasantry, which with its appendix of farm laborers, constitutes a considerable majority of the entire nation. But this class again sub-divided itself into different fractions. There were, firstly, the more wealthy farmers, what is called in Germany _Gross_ and _Mittel-Bauern_, proprietors of more or less extensive farms, and each of them commanding the…

   Friedrich Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution

   States what Upper class is.

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3. Afterwards, while this upper class grows distinct from the lower, and at the same time becomes more and more exclusively regulative and defensive in its functions, alike in the persons of kings and subordinate rulers, priests, and soldiers; the inferior class becomes more and more exclusively occupied in providing the necessaries of life for the community at large. From the soil, with which it comes in most direct…

   Herbert Spencer, Essays

   Opens on Upper class; names Upper class.

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Philosophers who discussed Upper class

• Intellectual

Related ideas

• Great Britain
• Ireland
• Wealth
• The Guardian
• President of the United States
• Pulitzer Prize
• Nobility
• Social class
• Spanish Empire
• The New York Times
• World War II
• Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
• United States
• Cambridge
• Aristocracy
• Working class
• Haymarket Books
• England

Place in the tradition

Part of Aesthetics.

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