Culture of Baroque starts from the wishes of the active and powerful parts of society to face the economic crisis in action, unfolding the use of power in forms and unusual ways, creating and favoring a new culture.
New conception of life
At the beginnings of the '600 man mostly assumes awareness that his intervention can modify the reality where he lives. Society is conceived like a human being that must have taken care of: as a matter of fact medical terms are used for prognosticate diagnosis and to prescribe suitable cares. Life's conditions of the whole society are not particularly different from the medioeval or Renaissance epoch, even if there were been progresses in various sciences. What changes is the perception of reality and quality of life. Man can improve reality but he can also worse it: in concomitance with the economic crises of this epoch, emerges in society the perception that bad governments are discomfort's cause. It doesn't surprise, therefore, that the Seventeenth century revolts instigated by lower social layers of population were address against the guilty rulers of bad management.
Power's different structure
There's still a social pyramid structure, where to the vertex there's feudal aristocracy. But unlike medieval period, changes the relationship between people: in front of middle class ascent, the aristocracy defends its positions of privilege, embracing and opposing at the same time the crown and making itself shield of religious ethic; nevertheless, its slow decline starts to become inexorable. Vassals that defend their privileges on land begin to leave to the middle class all economic activities of "pre-capitalism", and to the Crown the burden to form armies, contributing with donations of money, but without furnishing men and weapons anymore for sovereign's wars. Therefore on populace the whole weight of social life is poured again, also taxes and war militias.
Impoverishment of the fourth state
Oppressive politics are effected towards farmers, so much to force them to get into debts and to sell the land purchased by the noble to low cost: these last doesn't exploit often the full wealth, and they push thousand of hungry farmers to flow themselves in cities. Poverty increases in generalized way as the epidemics and famines: it's just this extremely precarious situation that obliges part of the population to the vagabond life and the brigandage. It doesn't even miss the phenomenon of the religious brigandage by cleric envoys who have resentments toward the superiors.
Birth of the absolutism
To stop this social instability it grows the central power that experiments a way from the absolutism with the support of church and, in a strife-torn situation, also of aristocracy. The absolutist system puts a series of measures to hold the stability into effect and not only repressive but rather it cultivates and experiments new forms of language to persuade, whether to fight, the subjects and to hold them within the ethic that is wanted to impose. We remember that in seventeen century an English king loses the head as a Spanish minister, this just to explain how high was the conflict.