Kingsley Davis
August 20, 1908 – February 27, 1997
Kingsley Davis, the grand-newphew of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, was born August 20, 1908 in Tuxedo, Texas, the son of Joseph Dyer Davis and Winifred (Kingsley) Davis. Davis earned a B.A. in English from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1930, followed by an M.A. in Philosophy from the same school in 1932. In 1933 Davis earned a second M.A. degree, this time in Sociology from Harvard University. His PhD was awarded by Harvard in 1936 based on his dissertation entitled “A Structural Analysis of Kinship”.
Davis was elected by his peers as the 49th President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address, entitled “The Myth of Functional Analysis as a Special Method in Sociology and Anthropology,” was delivered on September 4, 1959 at the Association’s Annual Meeting in Chicago. His address was later published in the December 1959 issue of the American Sociological Review (ASR Vol. 24, No. 6, pp 757-772). Upon his death in 1997, an obituary for Davis was published in Footnotes, along with letters of remembrance from his peers (see April 1997 issue of Footnotes, pages 4 and 8).
Obituary
Written by John Finley Scott, published in Footnotes, April 1997.
The death of Kingsley Davis at age 88 on February 27, 1997 is a closing event in the intellectual history of American sociology in its most fertile years. Davis once told me that as a young academic he felt like he was “living in a golden age”. Looking back we can see that it was a golden age: Sociology was a new and growing field where a small bold band of ambitious young scholars created a rich disciplinary legacy. Unsentimental and iconoclastic, sharp-witted and combative, Kingsley Davis enjoyed an outstanding reputation in many disciplines as a scientist and scholar. But he was never fully attuned to his sociological audience. In his youth he offended the polite advocates of “family life education”. Later he offended leftist ideologues and contraceptive evangelists. Still, if we judge his work for the clarify and economy of his exposition, and for the breadth and scope and profundity of his ideas, he was quite arguable the greatest sociologist of his golden age.
A grand-nephew of Confederate President Jefferson Davis (whom he strongly resembled) Kingsley Davis was born to a poor but proud family in Tuxedo, Texas, near Wichita Falls. At the University of Texas he studied literature and philosophy, leaving to join the sociological ascendency by taking his PhD at Harvard. Though strongly influenced by the young Talcott Parsons, he wrote his dissertation under W. Lloyd Warner on a “Structural Analysis of Kinship: Prolegomena to the Sociological of Kinship”. He taught briefly at Smith and Clark Colleges, and Willard Waller then brought him to Pennsylvania State University for seven years.
Although Davis published consistently throughout his professional life, this was his most prolific period. Through his study of kinship he gained a masterful understanding of the structure of the family and its derivative social processes, which he applied to his superb (and in many cases still definitive) articles on the elements of kinship, reproductive institutions, sexual appetites and relations, statuses of age and sex, marital selection, and mechanisms of ascription and socialization. Moving to Princeton University for four years, he published with Wilbert Moore “Some Principles of Stratification.” This essay applies a labor-market supply-and-demand economic analysis though without any use of economists’ terminology to strata and the links between stratification and major social institutions. Later Davis expanded the theory by linking it to the process of familial status ascription. This, the “Davis-Moore Theory of Stratification,” is his best-known work and, because of its implication that egalitarian ideology is quixotic, his most controversial one.
In 194 he joined the expanding program at Columbia University and published his comprehensive treatise, Human Society. This classic volume has much going against it. Though organized as a text, it presents highly original ideas. The book’s simple style and homely (and now dated) examples makes the subtle and abstract character of its systematic theory of evolutionary functionalism, whose key premise Davis revealed only in a strategic footnote; 1948 was still too early for any new concept of social evolution to rise in plan view from the ashes of Social Darwinism. The book stayed in print for 20 years, and Davis always looked back at it with pride, but its impact as a theoretical statement was muted. It was not Davis but Talcott Parsons, impenetrable in style and utterly devoid of parsimony, who gave sociologists what they wanted in heavy theory.
Next Davis went to the University of California, Berkeley in 1955 and remained there for 22 years. Elected President of the American Sociological Association in 1959, he caused yet more controversy with his presidential address on “the myth of functional analysis,” arguing that functional analysis was the same as any analysis of relations among variables and processes. As he then defined functional analysis this was inarguable, but he artfully avoided the thesis of “evolutionary functionalism” of which he had made so much use the claim that institutions and forms of social organization are shaped over time by a process of competitive selection. This thesis is stated much more explicitly by Fredrich Hayek (and, earlier, by Edmund Burke) than it ever was by Davis.
By this time Davis was becoming increasingly distanced from the discipline to which he had contributed so much. Leftists, more and more the discipline’s rank and file, could not tolerate the principal author of “Some Principles of Stratification” and its dreadful implication that abominable privilege might somehow make sense. Fantastic stories circulated in Berkeley of his evil ideas and cruel decision, and most graduate students avoided him. He spoke with some regret of his “reputation as an ogre.” Most of his energy now went into social demography, on which he had in any case been working since the 1940s, developing the concept of the demographic transition and in his monograph, “The Population of India and Pakistan”. His 1956 essay (with Judith Blake) “Social Structure and Fertility: An Analytic Framework” firmly established the sociological foundations for any analysis of the determinants of human fertility. His 1967 article, “Population Policy: Will Current Programs Succeed?” predicted the failure of “quick-fix” approaches to fertility reduction. Quick fixes (e.g., control of epidemic disease) worked in reducing mortality; why not the same for reducing fertility? The problem, Davis explained, was that the social institutions sustaining high fertility were robust. They had to be: Bearing children is costly, so that high fertility, a s an adaptation to centuries of high mortality, requires vigorous institutional support. But death, which comes to all, requires no such support, and, since few want to die, reduction in mortality (“Death control” as opposed to “birth control” is how Davis put it) is always popular and is not opposed by strong institutions. The result is rapid population growth, checked only by new causes of mortality or gradual decay off institutional support for high fertility, as is the demographic transition in the Western world.
Davis was no less comprehensive in demography than he had been in sociology. Besides studies on fertility, he also wrote extensively on migration and urbanization. In 1977 he left Berkeley for the University of Southern California and (jointly) the Hoover Institution, retiring in 1992. Never one to miss a new trend, at the end of his career he wrote on the decline of fertility on developed societies’ falling in fact to well below replacement levels and he speculated on the consequences of this literal “decline of the west” for world social and economic organization. He is survived by his wife, Marta Seoana, four children, and two grandchildren.
