Since collective life contents, child rearing and marriage, occupation and political standpoint, aesthetic inclination and economic means, are all “status specific,” all standardizations, which give the individual the material of his life half-finished, as it were, are channeled through a single canal. Certainly there were universally binding stereotypings of equal or greater power in guild and priesthood, in hereditary callings and in the compulsions of caste and class. Yet the distinguishing characteristic of the nobility is that that other element—personality, freedom, the internally grounded—became of greater value and of greater significance here than in other structures. This is because the substance transmitted in the nobility did not take on an objective, individual-transcending configuration; rather, only the particular form and power of the individual makes the whole transmitted material come alive.

DEFINE: Distinguishes nobility from other status structures by the primacy of the individual's inner form over objective transmitted configurations.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 521