nificant role throughout history in determining aspects of inequality ..... In Canada for example-which has no estate or wealth tax, Statis tics Canada occasionally ...
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THE CULTURE AND STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY NICO STEHR The University of Alberta
For just as the substance of education-in spite of, or because of its general availability-can ultimately .b.e acquired only through individ ual activity, 50 it gives rise to the most tangible and thus the most unassailable aristocracy, to a distinetion between high and low which can be abolished neither (as can socio-economic differences) by decree or a revolution, nor by the good will of those concerned (Georg Simmel,
[1907] 1978:439-440).
Almost a century ago, Georg Simmel speculates, in his Philosophy o{Money, about a most invidious and insidious form of social inequality
in modern society. Though it remains widely invisible, at least to the professional eye, 1 its importance may well have increased manifold since the turn of the century. But one does not have to share the
anticipatory enthusiasm of Daniel Bell (1973:213) and his reference,
in analogy to the system of inequality in the Republic of Plato-to the Scientific City of the future and its three classes of elite scientists
and top professional administrators, the middle class of engineers and the professoriate, and the proletariat of teclmicians, junior faculty,
and teaching assistants-to realize that most theories of social in
equality lack correspondence to the social conditions to which they are intended to apply. Class analysis appears to have fallen into dis
repute. Its demise perhaps accelerated by the disappearance of many states which attempted to abolish class· in practice. And what self-consciously remains of class analysis. in social science and desires to be apart from the examination of class in strictly Marxist terms, 1 But as Simmel ([1907] 1978:440) also observes, "there is no advantage that appears to those iri inferior positions to be so despised, and therefore which they feel so deprived and help!es8, as the advantage of education."
International Journal of Group Tensions, 1994, Volume 24, Number 4
