This recruiting from within conveys the unique insularity and self-sufficiency of this status group which, so to speak, can and may need nothing that lies outside itself. The nobility is, thereby, like an island in the world. It is comparable to a work of art, within which each part also takes its meaning from the whole, and which shows through its frame that the world cannot enter, that it is absolutely sufficient unto itself.

DEFINE: The metaphor of the frame defines what makes a status group internally coherent — that each member takes meaning only from the whole, matching a work of art.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 512