ABSTRACT
This chapter originated in the request of two colleagues who asked the author in the late 1960s to write an introduction to the study of inequality. Their request was based on his interest in problems of social stratification, starting with the reader Class, Status and Power, edited together with Seymour Martin Lipset, and including a jointly researched book Social Mobility in Industrial Society (1959). Inequalities arising from class differences did not seem nearly as important as inequalities arising from national and ethnic differences. The history of the labor movement itself was proof of that. In our world, inequality among men is considered an aspect of social organization, not a divinely ordained attribute of the human condition. The chapter presents a discussion that distinguishes between modern and premodern history, divided by a transitional period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and provides some warrant for making that distinction.
