DISCUSSION OF PAPERS BY PROFESSOR NISBET AND PROFESSOR HEBERLE.

This section presents commentaries on the articles The Decline and Fall of Social Class, by Robert A. Nisbet and Recovery of Class Theory, by Rudolf Heberle. According to Bernard Barber of Barnard College, the authors of both articles are agreed that social stratification theory is in need of improvement. He is of the same mind. He agrees strongly with many of their strictures on current theories of social stratification. But he cannot quite accept the solutions they offer for the difficulties. Nisbet seems to recommend the abandonment of the notion of social class for modern society in the U.S., that is what the title of his article suggests. Yet after an excellent critique of current stratification theories, Nisbet cannot go the whole way in abandoning what they are struggling to understand. However, Otis Dudley Duncan from the University of Chicago said that the two articles under discussion do their bit toward the removal of ethnocentric bias in the analysis of stratification, both are explicitly written in a comparative framework. However, one could wish that both authors had been a little more obsessed with method. He is convinced that the issue as between the two papers cannot be resolved on the conceptual level, but requires the explicit acceptance of a common set of methodological criteria for identifying classes and for establishing the determinants, concomitants and consequences of class stratification.