ABSTRACT
Many social thinkers have identified social problems not so much as issues of social inequality but as issues of social integration; they have emphasized a lack of consensus in society. Social inequality, in societies such as ours, is manifested in a very wide variety of ways—wider than is usually recognized in public discussion of the matter. Differences in social power and advantage, simply because they imply differences across the whole range of life-chances, always tend, other things being equal, to become generalized differences. It has to be recognized that structures of social inequality of both condition and opportunity—or, in other words, systems of social stratification—are inherently highly resistant to change. Turning secondly to the "culturalist" type of analysis, it should be said that this has been chiefly elaborated by American social scientists interested in the question of the social bases of stable and effective democracy.
