Some Principles of Stratification: A Critical Analysis

The fact of social inequality in human society is marked by its ubiquity and its antiquity. The ubiquity and the antiquity of such inequality have given rise to the assumption that there must be something both inevitable and positively functional about such social arrangements. A generalized theory of social stratification must recognize that the prevailing system of inducements and rewards is only one of many variants in the whole range of possible systems of motivation which, at least theoretically, are capable of working in human society. Whether or not differential rewards and opportunities are functional in any one generation, it is clear that if those differentials are allowed to be socially inherited by the next generation, then, the stratification system is specifically dysfunctional for the discovery of talents in the next generation. Smoothly working and stable systems of stratification, wherever found, tend to build-in obstacles to the exploration of the range of available talent.