Class and Society Author:Kurt B. Mayer From the Foreword: Today the study of social stratification is a major sociological enterprise in the United States. To be sure, earlier American sociologists -- for example, Ward and Sumner and Cooley -- were concerned with the subject, but its rise to prominence in more recent times began less than two decades ago. Interest in stratification w... more »as provoked by events of the 1930s: by the Great Depression and the associated economic and political developments of the prewar decade; by the temporary but often intense preoccupation of American intellectuals with Marxist theory, which rarely engulfed but frequently stimulated younger sociologists; by the influx of scholars from abroad whose interest in stratification derived from their European social background and academic training; by the slow but persistent departure from "crude empiricism: in the direction of a convergence of research and theory, the latter including previously neglected conceptions of class structure and change. . . .« less