This paper challenges the widely held view that novel and fundamental changes in the structure of social hierarchy have altered the basis of distributional conflict in modern Britain. Reference to nineteenth-century developments shows that sectionalism, egoism and privatism are not peculiar to the present economic recession. It is then argued that commentators on the left and right alike have oversimplified the relationship between the distributional order of societies, on the one hand, and the specific forms taken by distributional conflicts on the other. This means that the implications of the lack of a capitalist Sittlichkeit (morality or moral order) for social integration may be quite different from those commonly drawn in recent studies.
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