Rethinking elites in British sociology: Great Britain as a house-society.

This article presents a novel conceptual framework using Claude Lévi-Strauss's concept of a "house-society" to analyze England's ruling institutions, commonly referred to as "The Establishment." It argues that these institutions simultaneously naturalize social status and exaggerate political-economic inequalities by employing kinship idioms to legitimize exclusive membership, reflecting England's unique historical fusion of pre-modern status symbols with capitalist structures. The framework is applied to institutions like Eton College, illustrating how traditional notions of kinship and inherited belonging persist alongside contemporary economic and political dynamics, especially amid recent political developments such as Brexit. The article critiques existing sociological approaches to the Establishment for circular reasoning and proposes the house-society perspective as a means to better understand the interplay of status, class, and power in English society.