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Although useful for analytical purposes, the three properties of wealth outlined in the previous section tell us little about the unique role that wealth plays in people’s lives, as reflected in the quotations at the start of this chapter, or about the social contexts and mechanisms that contribute to this role. In order to make sense of the diverse functions and meanings attached to wealth—from the heavy weight of financial debt that inhibits the future plans of a young professional to the pride expressed by a first-time homeowner or to the sense of security that wealth provides—one needs a social theory of wealth mobility and inequality. Any attempt to conceptualize the multilayered role of wealth in society and the social processes underpinning economic security (or asset poverty) in contemporary societies can benefit from the insights provided by the social theories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contemplating many of the questions that guide wealth studies today, these early theories offer a rich—if not always comprehensive or consistent—conceptual foundation for contemporary wealth processes. The objective of the next section is to explore some of the key concepts within these seminal works, which complement the more recent, predominantly empirical and quantitative, research on wealth.