Before the birth of the Industrial Society, which as is known was a direct consequence of the Revolutions Industrial and French, the type of social structure in force was that which characterized a society status. In this society, those born in the lower strata would be condemned to remain in them, since there was no possibility of social ascension.
To understand the status society, which would mark much of Western history, especially when we look at Europe in the Middle Ages, we can imagine the figure of a triangle in which the estates (social groups) would be arranged as follows: king, clergy, noble lords and, finally, commoners. As Hélio Jaguaribe (2001) points out, there were “those who prayed (orators), those who fought (bellatores) and those who worked (laborators). Still, according to him, it is recorded that “Bishop Adelberonte de Leon found that Christian society was divided and three orders, which he considered necessary and complementary, each providing indispensable services to the other two”. (JAGUARIBE, 2001, p. 408).
At the top of this triangle was the clergy, made up of the men of the church, a fundamental group not only for the maintenance of the ideological power from a religious point of view, but because they played a strategic and fundamental role in the support and maintenance of the status quo of real power. The function of this status was to pray, that is, to watch over the spiritual life of the people. Next, in a lower estate, were the so-called noble lords, whose function was combat, the defense of the kingdom in battle.
The nobles, as a group, sought to marry among themselves, had property and wealth, and a general recognition that they were superior to the commoners, the last estate. But titles of nobility and recognition also depended on the king's assent, who decorated individuals he considered deserving of some merit. Therefore, one can imagine how impossible it would be for a commoner, located at the base of this pyramid that formed the status society, to raise another a condition of life different from that in which he was stuck with work, subordination, paying taxes, a life of restrictions, limitations and poverty. Therefore, when one was born poor, one carried a stigma or a kind of label throughout life, which contributed to definitively demarcate the individual's position among the groups.
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Thus, only after social, political and economic transformations (among them the questioning of the absolutist power of kings, the defense of freedom of expression and religion, and the development of capitalism, to name just a few) that dismantled the foundations of this state-based society is that social ascension or mobility seemed less utopian, closer to reality. The end of the status society was marked by the birth of a class society, which thanks to a greater division of social work would allow people to move through different classes social.
Paulo Silvino Ribeiro
Brazil School Collaborator
Bachelor in Social Sciences from UNICAMP - State University of Campinas
Master in Sociology from UNESP - São Paulo State University "Júlio de Mesquita Filho"
Doctoral Student in Sociology at UNICAMP - State University of Campinas
