ON THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF PLURALISM 23 It is a complicated task, then, to take pluralist sociology head-on : for instead of a collection there results only a scattered array of responses, each more evasive than the other. For like an amoeba, pluralist thought splits and subdivides on approach, assuming contradictory positions simultaneously, offering multitudinous images of resistance. In many ways like the formal structure of myth, it is ever adaptive and ever totalising, for, lacking real substance it must take on the impression, however muted, of the first really hard hit of facts it encounters. If we nevertheless joust this hydra-headed protoplasm across the arena of this paper it is admittedly with the gravest apprehensions and misgivings, spurred on by the knowledge that science must march on. relentless of the ogres that obstruct intellectual passage, deny critical access, and guard the seemingly impenetrable fortresses of unreason. For the purposes of this paper which has no pretention to extensive-ness in scope or scale, we choose our predators with selective emphasis laying ourself bare to charges of inadequate exposition, imprecise construction and incomplete comment. II We initiate our discussion with an examination of a paper entitled "Inequality and Social Change951 which deals admittedly with the pressing social issues of today. The monograph which was originally delivered in the form of a lecture begins with the statement : The study of inequality occupies a central place in sociology and has, in a sense, provided the main impetus to the growth of the discipline itself. It is necessary at the very beginning to pause and reflect. A random survey of sociological literature in general, contemporary sociology in particular, and Indian sociology in paraparticular, only betrays the paucity of meaningful sociological adventures in the field of inequality and social change : the stress, of course, being on the term meaningful. For, certainly it is possible to sustain that the leading lights of sociological theory, Comte, Pareto, Mosca, Durkheim and Max Weber were consumed by the theoretical appeal of social inequality : in the sense of aiming to sustain, prolong and perpetrate it. History must surely stand in error; for if the 'main impetus' to the 'growth of the discipline9 was so patently ideological, then what of its contemporary practitioners who, instead of rejecting this tradition, claim all the more pride in stressing continuities within it ? Ironically, as if to demonstrate our contention, subsequent confirmation is offered : Rather, it is the social scientist's task to point out that the real choice is not between equality and inequality : in the real world what one chooses is very often one type of inequality in place of the other. This is unmistakeably the kind of consolation offered by Messrs Mosca2 and Pareto3 in their respective sociologies : that the formulas change but the fact of oligarchy remains. Human nature demands