&gt; That is a useless definition in terms of policy. We don&#x27;t care which legal profession people have.<p>I disagree that its useless in terms of policy, and it has nothing to do with which legal profession people have (no matter what work you do, if you make most of your support from working for someone else, you are working class; if you are supported by a mix of your own capital and your own labor, with neither being overwhelmingly dominant, you are middle class, if you are mostly renting labor to apply to your own capital, you are a capitalist.<p>&gt; The original definition of middle class even included working class people. Working class people are not serfs and they are not aristocracy so by default they are middle class.<p>Yes, the meaningful relations to the economy under the <i>feudal</i> economic system are different than under the <i>capitalist</i> economic system [0]. The replacement of the feudal system of property (notably, the end of feudal land tenure making land title a marketable commodity fungible with other forms of capital, as well as conversion of feudal obligations over time from service-based to payment-based obligations) eliminated the distinctions in relationship to the economy represented by the feudal class structure, replacing them with a different set of relevant relations, those of the capitalist system.<p>[0] As an aside, an interesting example of the period of transition between the two systems is found in Adam Smith&#x27;s <i>Wealth of Nations</i>, where Smith talks about the relations of three classes to policy, and they map roughly to the <i>feudal</i> upper class -- which he favors as the class most reliable as both knowing and being able to pursue their interest and having that interest aligned with the common interest, the <i>capitalist</i> upper (and arguably, conflated with them, middle) class -- which he sees as dangerous because their interests will conflict with the common interest -- and the capitalist <i>working</i> class (which he sees as unreliable despite sharing, and arguably defining, the common interest because they are too uneducated to know their own interest, or effectively pursue them if they did).