By Liah Greenfeld
In the 16th century, in England, several remarkable things happened:
Social mobility, inconceivable before, became legitimate and common;
The ideal of Romantic love between a man and a woman emerged and “true love,” as we understand it today, was added to the human emotional range;
The word “people,” which earlier referred to the lower classes, became synonymous with “nation,” which at the time had the meaning of “an elite”;
Numerous new words appeared, among them “aspiration,” “happiness,” and “madness”;
The English society, previously a society of hierarchically arranged orders of nobility, clergy, and laborers under the sovereignty of God and his Vicar in Rome, was redefined as a sovereign community of equals;
The nature of violent crime, personal and political, changed, with crime that was not rational in the sense of self-interested becoming much more common;
The attitude to pets, especially dogs and cats, changed, transforming these animals in many cases from living multi-purpose tools to our friends and soul-mates;
The pursuit of growth — rather than survival, as was the case before – became the goal of the economy;
Mental diseases which were later to be named “schizophrenia,” “manic-depressive illness,” and “depression” were first observed, shifting the interest of the medical profession, in particular, from other, numerous, mental diseases that were known since the times of antiquity.