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Social Stratification

Notes A Biographical Sketch
Kingsley Davis (1908-1997), a student of Pitirim Sorokin and Talcott Parsons, received his Ph. D.
from Harvard’s Department of Sociology in 1936. Parsons, at the time, was gathering around him
the faculty and students who would assist him in developing functional theory, including Davis
and Moore. In the late 1930s Davis held a position at Pennsylvania State College (now Pennsylvania
State University), followed by positions at Princeton University during the 1940s; Columbia
University during the 1950s; and the University of California at Berkeley from the late 1950s until
his retirement in the 1980s. Davis’ primary academic interest eventually centered on demography.
Wilbert E. Moore (1914-1987) received his Ph.D. from Harvard’s Department of Sociology in 1940.
While Moore was also a student of Parsons, Davis—along with Robert Merton and John Riley—
was part of Parsons’ first graduate student cohort and Davis maintained a closer intellectual and
collegial connection with Parsons early in his career. In 1945, at the time “Some Principles of
Stratification” was written, both Davis and Moore were teaching at Princeton University (as was
their first published critic, Melvin Tumin). Moore remained at Princeton University until the mid-
1960s. He left for the Russell Sage Foundation for a few years before joining the faculty at the
University of Denver, where he completed his career. In addition to receiving their doctoral
degrees from a prestigious department, and teaching at several highly regarded universities, both
Davis and Moore were elected to terms as president of the American Sociological Association.
The “Some Principles” Debate in Historical Context
In 1953 Melvin Tumin published the first public commentary on the Davis-Moore article. Tumin
carefully critiqued their thesis and later engaged in a series of published exchanges with Davis
and Moore regarding the theory.
The visibility, and perhaps the tenor, of the debate with Tumin, as well as its location within the
pages of the ASR, engendered wide attention and led to more published responses to the original
article. Indeed, the Davis and Moore article is now recognized as “one of the most widely cited
and debated pieces to ever appear in a sociology journal,” a rather remarkable feat for an argument
consisting of fewer than 5,000 words. No fewer than thirty substantive articles and commentaries
have appeared addressing the Davis-Moore article in professional journals in the United States
over the years, many written by prominent members of the profession. Moreover, most of these
papers appeared in the major journals : the majority of the articles during the 1950s and 1960s
appeared in the pages of the American Sociological Review, with nearly two-thirds appearing in
either the ASR or the American Journal of Sociology. In this regard, one may almost say that the
stature of the ASR—only in its tenth year when the original article was published—and the
prominence of the Davis-Moore controversy grew symbiotically, each feeding off the other.
While primarily an American thesis advanced and debated by American, academic sociologists,
papers, books, and course syllabi addressing the article and ensuing controversy have been written
by foreign authors and appeared in languages other than English, a further indicator of the reach,
if not influence, of the article. Given the immediate postwar insularity of American sociology, the
diffusion of the Davis-Moore article into European sociology circles was not immediate. Most
foreign references are within the last twenty-five years, not the first twenty-five years, after
publication of the 1945 paper.
Throughout the long debate there was—as Broom and Cushing observed twenty-five years ago—
”a sense that the writers were dealing with matters worthy of argument,” although addressing a
topic and theory “susceptible to diverse interpretations.” More than fifty years later, this sense of
“worthiness” permeates the entire debate.

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