ABSTRACT
Despite the dominating importance of the racial problem in both national and international affairs, the concept of race has not played a central role in the development of modern social theory. The claim of some proponents of the concept of plural society that this idea represents a radical innovation in dominant sociological theory is only true with respect to that body of thought which attributes overriding importance to the function of common values for social integration. While similarities between the positions of subordinate class and racial groupings could no doubt be identified, the distinction between class conflict and the ethnic or racial conflict of a plural society remains a basic one. Once the study of sociology came to be focused, at any rate at a theoretical level, on the universal, constitutive properties of societies in general, the essential social facts could legitimately be abstracted from the accidental.
