ABSTRACT
Sociological interest has tended to focus on inequality and its forms, causes, and justifications. There has been, however, for several centuries now, a trend to the institutionalization of continually extending bases of equality. Cultural influences as the conceptions of natural rights or the rights of man had a profound effect on the normative definition of the nature of the new society and received a particularly important embodiment in the Bill of Rights, which was built into the United States Constitution as the first ten amendments. The process of differentiation in modern society has, however, broken down this double synthesis, insofar as it existed at all, in classical nineteenth-century "capitalism". In consequence, not only has the mobility of economic and political resources been greatly enhanced but the door has been opened to the involvement of factors other than the classical three of kinship solidarity, proprietorship, and political power in private organizations.
