Social inequality in the 19th and 20th centuries: some introductory remarks

Abstract

Why should social inequality be the topic of a session of a history congress rather than of a meeting of sociologists and, hence, a section of this book by historians rather than by sociologists? Why should one raise the issue of social inequality in a period of deep worldwide economic crisis in which the general public is interested in other themes and in which social inequality is often considered as a preoccupation of the past economic boom ? Why should social inequality be treated in a series of papers on quantitative history after having become so much a preoccupation of intellectual history and of ideological debates? I shall briefly answer these important and unavoidable questions, then cover the definition as well as some ideas on the long-term change of social inequality and finally say something about the three cases which are dealt with in the following papers, i. e. Sweden, Poland, and the U.S.