Toward the End of Ethnicity?

In the United States the study of ethnicity has long been a key element in analyses of the population’s composition, but this was far less true of social disciplines in Western Europe. Such classics of European social analysis as the works of Vilfredo Pareto and Max Weber had little to say on the subject, and Karl Marx’s distinctive contribution was to deny the significance of ethnicity altogether. In Britain, John Stuart Mill and Lord Acton wrote on problems associated with nationalism, but with few followers. “It was only after the end of the Second World War, and particularly during the 1960s, that social scientists [in Britain] began to recognize the central place of race relations in the study of society.” That is the opening sentence of a book by the English sociologist John Stone. ¹