the baffled king composing

When I read  Aeschylus in Athens for the first time some years ago, it was a bit of a revelation.  Slaves dying in the mines of Athens while the politically heterageneous [sic] discussed the fine points of democracy above.  As late as the 19th c. in the Anglo-American context, it was taken as an immutable rule of life that a certain fraction of the population lived in a manner to keep alive high ideas (hence the ruthless censure of immorality -- it wasn't necessarily from private censoriousness), and the rest contributed to society by their brute labor, and had no such social obligations, and would have been thought presumptuous if they had assumed them.  

Then, things began to change, although this change had been anticipated in many ways.  The gentleman farmer of the enlightenment had been a phenomenon from Dover to Moscow.  Private claims of virtue from the religious revivals and protestant cults.  Even earlier, the Elizabethan ("Leicester's Commonwealth") shift in power away from the aristocracy generally and towards the merchant class.

With the massive industrialization (and associated wars) of the late 19th c. and early 20th c., the population became a fungible mass.  Elitism was instead associated with institutions, ones which any given man (and later, person) could hope to enter.

And now the mechanisms of industrialization have assured prosperity to a large part of the world.  But there are still people with many possessions and much power, and people with few possessions and little power.  And I don't think we have a way of understanding this.  The default is some protestant-virtue justification, in which the poor are thought to be insufficiently conditioned, and in some measure that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But if this prosperity of a healthy preponderance were to have been gained by the ruthless and amoral conduct of its corporatist managers and informal syndicates, and there had been little claim to a meritocracy and much corruption in allocating positions, I'm not certain that we would have have perceived that, collectively speaking.