The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It

by Will Storr

This openness to novel ideas became a status-making pursuit. At first in Italy in the 1500s, and then across Western Europe, there spread a fashion for possessing ‘useful knowledge’. In the beginning, this manifested as ‘an upper class fascination with learning and the arts, combining the features of the scholar and gentleman into a serious if perhaps somewhat amateurish intellectual’, writes economic historian Professor Joel Mokyr. These gentleman thinkers, known as ‘virtuosi’, wrote books on subjects as disparate as forestry, mathematics and sumptuary laws. Their success-play was founded on a love of knowledge for its own sake. The virtuosi, ‘turned curiosity, once regarded as a vice, into a virtue’. Showing knowledge had become a status symbol: ‘the courtier had become a scholar, and culture for social ornament passed into learning for fame and admiration’.