Describing symbolic hereditary destinations. Every social system has some modifications of the gradations so clear visible in a feudal system. An hereditary elite is directly powerful in those states and communities in which authority is an integral vestment of office. In such places, law and institutional sanctions butress habit and custom to make the system operative. In other areas the hereditary elite may be divested of direct authority and serve only as symbols of the ruling authority.
English rulers are the usual example of the latter situation.
These monarchs are used as symbols for the political purposes of the ruling ministries. In societies dedicated to a democratic tradition there are also hereditary elites, although their rights and privileges may be more obscure and less well defined than in constitutional monarchic states. Property and money handed from one generation to another in democratic states lend social prestige and a modicum of power to those so possessed. In modern societies, class systems are the generalized social structures that define gradations of eliteness or the lack of it. The process of identifying others in a class scale is primarily psychological in its operation.