Concepts of social stratification : European and American models /

In American society, the values of freedom and order conflict with the manifestations of social inequality. American sociologists, influenced by European thinkers, viz., Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and de Tocqueville, have devised seemingly diverse concepts of social class in their study of US society. In what he calls the "study of the semantics of social stratification," Hess (sociology, Univ. College Dublin) examines these intellectual developments using the obscure ideas of Jeffrey Alexander. Nine chapters follow an introduction and five chapters on the aforementioned Europeans (two chapters on Marx), each devoted to a sociologist or to a loosely delineated school, (e.g., the Chicago school of human ecology, the sociology of black communities found in the writings of Du Bois, Frazier, and Wilson); the final chapter is a summation. Among the sociologists who merit a chapter are Veblen, Mills, the Lynds, and Parsons. This opaque book of words about words adds little to our understanding of social inequality, nor does it clarify the presumably different concepts of social stratification. Faculty only. D. Harper University of Rochester