Incidentally, while I don’t disagree in substance with the account that you offer (not qualified to do so!) as someone who works on the exact other chronological end of the process, it strikes me as a little foreshortened and underestimating the degree to which a lot of this is visible in the rather different economic and social circumstances of the 1st century B.C.

So in becoming “just jobs”, the professions themselves have lost something–they are increasingly less and less “good jobs”–but the wider society has also lost something. I think it’s the latter that’s particularly important to recapture–that we still have a need for medicine, law, teaching, counseling and so on to have a sense of higher mission and to have some kind of autonomy to pursue it.

The old solidarity of the professions (I realize that this is an obvious observation) depended on there being a tightly restricted list of things that counted as professions which were sharply defined against other occupations that did not count as professions and carried much less prestige. An interesting question: at what point did it become normal English to commend a skilled tradesperson as “doing a professional job” of fixing a burst pipe or whatever?

Note: I’m not saying that actual social practice has necessarily changed all that much. Male doctors may well marry female lawyers at close to the rate at which male doctors used to marry the daughters of male lawyers. They would however now marry journalists and members other groups that once upon a time did not have the apparatus of professional education attached to them, or, like IT people, did not actually exist.

But I think that, conceptually, Americans now mostly inhabit a world in which what were once professions are *jobs* – good jobs, jobs that call for a great deal of further education, but not categorically different from other jobs and therefore not to be conflated with one another. A doctor self-identifies and is identified by others as “a doctor,” not as “a doctor, which is to say a professional.”

Solidarity among “professions” is therefore perhaps a non-starter without bringing back the array of social attitudes which supported it once upon a time – which is (a) unappetizing and (b) fortunately almost certainly impossible (see your previous post). So perhaps it would be better to look elsewhere as a point of departure.