ABSTRACT
The younger a branch of scholarship is, the more concerned are its historians to pursue its origins back at least as far as Greek antiquity. Historians of sociology are no exception to this rule. Aristotle was concerned as people are to examine the origin of the fourth type of inequality, social stratification. In terms of intellectual history, the same process meant that the question of the origin of inequality was now phrased in a new and different, i.e. sociological, manner. For many writers between 1750 and 1850, and for their public, the explanation of inequality in terms of private property remained politically attractive. The chief immediate effect of Parsons’s essay of 1940 was to acquaint American sociologists with the idea of a theory of social stratification. The largely conceptual paper published by Parsons’s disciple Kingsley Davis in 1942 was also mainly preparatory in character.
