E. Digby Baltzell Reconsidered: A Reply to Samuel Z. Klausner.

The article presents a response to Samuel Z. Klausner's article that appeared in the volume 16 of July 1998 issue of the journal "Sociological Theory." Klausner's essay is a thinly veiled attack on a late colleague, one that has no feel for sociologist Digby Baltzell's work and no appreciation of its place in the history of social thought. The author first points out a few factual errors in Klausner's essay. Baltzell was born in 1915, not 1916 as reported. No doubt religiosity and social status figure prominently in a scholar's work, but what Klausner chose not mention is just as, if not more, salient. Baltzell was a part of a generation stunned by the ease with which human freedom was eradicated in both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Baltzell's strategic use of concrete individuals to convey conceptual issues at once moral and analytical is more soundly grounded. Baltzell devoted his scholarly life to examining the dynamics of leadership in relation to human freedom. His concepts "elite" and "upper class" were the operational tools through which he carried out his task. Upper classes are communities composed of consanguine families having a consciousness of kind and bound together by a rich ritualistic life.