In this talk to his Chinese high school students, Jiang Xueqin explains how the Dutch Golden Age gave birth to the Middle Class.
With the transition from feudalism to market economics and from Catholicism to Calvinism, people changed their focus from accumulating status to accumulating wealth. This created the concept of “class.”
This concept brought with it certain pathologies (fears of disorder, failure, and germs) that expressed themselves in the Middle Class obsessions with money, art, and materialism.
With his paintings, Johannes Vermeer captured the hypocrisies of Middle Class life during the Dutch Golden Age.
