Oct 29, 2019, 12:19 PM
—“Those who Fight, Those who Pray, Those who Work What’s the fourth class?”— Richard Hall
^Burghers (the middle class). “Those who Trade”
The middle class emerged only once production was able to scale. And production could only scale once productivity was high enough to produce sufficient surpluses to scale.
We can modernize Tripartism and simply call them The Defensive, Military, Judicial classes, The Administrative, Clerical, Educational classes, and Productive Financial Entrepreneurial, Professional, Managerial, Craftsman and Labor classes. None of us mention the underclasses, because until recently that meant ‘slave’ because they lacked agency, family, resources, and knowledge to be allowed to ‘roam free’ without an ‘owner’ to take responsibility for them – meaning defend the population from them.
But since we develop elites in each of the Military, Administrative, and Productive classes, leaving the majority of the population managing only personal capital, especially the family, and making use of whatever elites that most serve their needs, we tend to separate the economic (Financial, Entrepreneurial,) from the Professional, Managerial, craftsmanly, and laboring classes.
The middle east and far east, because of flood river valleys, and irrigation in them, combined the organization of production into the priesthood, and into the state, and the merchant class, even wealthy, traded specialty goods more than organized commodity capital goods in production. Preserving the trading, craftsman, and workman classes, and maintaining what we consider the capitalist class into the state. The problem is of course, state inefficiency and parasitism.
The big economic shift occurred when the middle class Germanic Europe, was able to accumulate enough capital to develop the Hanseatic league on the continent – thanks to the lack of a strong central state – and create its own rule of law, own defense, own outposts, and trade networks. It ruled for three hundred years dragging northern Europe into post medieval wealth.
The British people able to do the same in the colonies by the same reason: a military state, but an entrepreneurial middle class, capable of funding it’s own adventure. The colonies ended up being a better long term investment, which is why germany, after fighting off napoleon, needed to unify to prevent another despotic french catastrophe, sought to expand her influences (rightly so in my understanding) into territories it had economically domesticated, putting her into competition with Russia and England by unbalancing the world distribution of powers england found (like the usa wrongly does today) the optimum for commercial gains.
The British Americans took this to the ultimate test, and created a purely middle class civilization – escaping both church and state – preserving the germanic rule of law, and individual sovereignty.
And while england created empire, germany created science, we created opportunity and productivity, and the rest is history.