Status Is Cultural: Durkheimian Poles and Weberian Russians Seek Great-Power Status

Like its etymological twin − the state, status emerges within a specific cultural context or, to better capture the importance of relations between polities, a civilizational context. According to Durkheim and Mauss, “[a] civilization constitutes a kind of moral milieu encompassing a certain number of nations, each national culture being only a particular form of the whole.” Status-seeking between any groups of polities takes place in a specific social context. What Durkheim and Mauss had in mind was Christendom. The historical fact that the state system grew out of Christendom and a Christian legal code (first ius gentium , then ius inter gentes ) has repercussions not only for those left status-less, but also for how status was conferred within the system. Conflict over status played itself out as a discussion of which king was closest to God. Earthly powers were ordered in a hierarchy of descending closeness to God, with France on top, then other Christian rulers, then non-Christian rulers (and, we may add, people who were seen to be without rulers altogether). This hierarchical order carried over into early modernity and beyond, most recently as a “standard of civilization.”