Wilbert E. Moore

Wilbert E. Moore (1914 to 1987) was an American sociologist noted, with Kingsley Davis, for an explanation and justification of social stratification based on the idea of functional necessity, set out in their paper Some Principles of Stratification (1945). Moore took his doctorate in sociology at Harvard University in 1940 as one of the first group of doctoral students of Talcott Parsons, together with Davis, Robert Merton and John Riley. He wrote the stratification paper with Davis while at Princeton University, where he remained until the middle of the 1960s, then spent a period at the Russell Sage Foundation before moving to the University of Denver, where he stayed until his retirement. His other writings include Social Change (1964) and an article on the social functions of ignorance written with Melvin Tumin. Moore served as the fifty sixth president of the American Sociological Association and was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.