The Theory of the Leisure Class proposes that economic life is driven by the vestiges of the social stratification of tribal society, rather than by social and economic utility. The supporting examples, contemporary and anthropologic, propose that many economic behaviors of contemporary society (c. late 19th century) are variants of the corresponding tribal-society behaviors, when men and women practiced the division of labor according to the person's status group, thus, the high-status people practiced hunting and war, whilst the low-status people practiced farming, cooking, et cetera.
Such a division of labor was due to the barbarian culture of conquest, domination, and exploitation, wherein, once in control, the conquerors assigned the labor-intensive jobs to the vanquished people, and, for themselves, assumed the military profession, and other less labor-intensive work, the elementary leisure class. In practice, it was sociologically unimportant that the low-status occupations provided greater economic support to society than did the high-status jobs of soldier, hunter, etc. Moreover, within an unconquered tribe, certain men and women disregarded the collective division-of-labor system, and emulated the behavior of the leisure class, the high-status social group of the tribe.
Although the leisure class did perform some useful work, and so contributed to the collective well-being of the tribe, such work tended to be minor and peripheral, functioning more as symbolic economic participation than as practical economic production. For example, although hunting could provide food for the tribe, it was less productive and less reliable than were farming and animal domestication, and easier, less labor-intensive, than the latter work. Likewise, whilst tribes required warriors for war, the members of the military stratum of the leisure class retained their high