The Pathologies of Inequality Are an Age-Old Preoccupation
Conservatives today often denigrate a concern with economic inequality as a deviant left-wing preoccupation. In fact, from antiquity to the present, canonical thinkers of diverse political orientations have diagnosed economic inequality as a great evil.
Economic inequality has been a concern of many of the greatest Western thinkers going back to antiquity. (iStock / Getty Images)
You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.
We shouldn’t care about economic inequality. And if we do care about economic inequality and try to fix it, that will only provoke trouble.
That has been a long-standing refrain of many a politician and intellectual. Milton Friedman famously remarked that a society that “puts equality before freedom will get neither.” Philosophers like Harry Frankfurt cautioned against a zeal for equality per se, insisting that what really matters is the absolute welfare of the poor rather than their relative level of wealth. Margaret Thatcher accused the Left of being content to have the poor be poorer so long as the rich were as well. And American conservatives have charged centrist politicians from Barack Obama to Kamala Harris with embracing “class warfare” and “Marxism” for proposing even milquetoast economic reforms.
The arguments against caring about inequality vary in both substance and quality. But a very common one runs that concern with economic inequality is an intellectual aberration — stoked, as William Buckley put it, by “ever so busy egalitarians” who agitate the lower orders with anti-Western ideas. This sentiment is carefully challenged by David Lay Williams in his new book, The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato to Marx. Williams, a professor of political science at DePaul University, marshals reams of textual evidence to show that economic inequality has been a concern of many of the greatest Western thinkers going all the way back to antiquity. This includes not only well-known radicals like Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but also less obvious economic egalitarians including Plato, Adam Smith, and Thomas Hobbes.
Economic Inequality, the “Greatest of All Plagues”
Williams’s book gets its title from Plato, who characterized economic inequality as fostering “the greatest of all plagues” in his late work the Laws. Williams notes that our modern world is plagued by extreme inequality. Since 1976, the “poorest 50 percent of Americans have seen their wealth grow an average of $12,000 per household-scarcely enough to cover a single major medical crisis without insurance, far less than one year of college tuition.” By contrast, the neoliberal era has been a very good time to be rich. Those “occupying the top 10 percent have seen their wealth grow by nearly $3 million” and the “top 1 percent have seen their wealth grow by $16 million. Those in the top 0.1 percent have seen their net wealth grow by $85 million. And those occupying the top 0.01 percent have seen their net wealth grow by $440 million per household.”
Beyond creating staggering economic disparities between American households (to say nothing of disparities between the richest Americans and the rest of the world), this has real political consequences. Even conservative political scientists like Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin have observed that resentment of economic elites has generated a widespread perception that democratically elected leaders don’t serve the interests of normal people. And social scientists including Martin Gilens and Thomas Piketty have demonstrated these aren’t just perceptions — the ultra-rich do very much enjoy an enormous amount of political clout compared to ordinary people.
The welcome contribution of Williams’s book is to show that many of the great thinkers of the Western philosophical canon wouldn’t have been surprised by this development. It inverts the common conservative argument that arguing against economic inequality is somehow contrary to the thrust of classical Western thought. If anything, it’s the casual and lazy dismissal of concerns with economic inequality that constitute an intellectual deviation and decline from the norm.
Williams notes that Plato, in the Laws, defined “inequality as a central problem of politics.” Plato warned that inequality would empower “vice” and that it “undermines civic friendship and harmony” in the polis. He proposed that inequality be “tightly restricted” and that the very wealthiest have “no more than four times the property of the poorest citizens.” Jesus in the New Testament also continuously emphasized the moral dangers of excess wealth, famously insisting in the Gospel of Matthew that “it will be hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” And St Paul warned that greed “obscures the imperative to love and tend to one’s neighbors.”
Millennia later, Hobbes — a thinker who broke with Christianity and Platonism on many points — also expressed deep reservations about inequality. In particular, he was concerned with the destabilizing political implications of extreme concentrations of wealth. Hobbes advises a prudent sovereign to redistribute wealth as needed to prevent instability provoked by plutocratic ambition on the part of the wealthy or envy and resentment on the part of the poor. Ironically, Williams’s reading of Hobbes suggests that conservative admirers like Michael Oakeshott have missed one of his core recommendations. If Hobbes is right, economic inequality might be a barrier to achieving the law and order that conservatives claim so strongly to defend.
Contemporary readers will likely be more familiar with the later thinkers discussed in Williams’s book, who are better known as commentators on inequality. That Rousseau, Mill, and Marx had egalitarian sympathies is unlikely to be controversial — though the way Marxism conceives equality is a matter of debate. More novel is Williams’s important contribution to the burgeoning literature on Adam Smith that showcases he was anything but a naive cheerleader for capitalism. In The Wealth of Nations, he expressed deep concern about how capitalists treated labor, noting that “masters” will form a “tacit but constant and uniform combination to not raise the wages of labour above their actual rates.” Smith anticipated Marx in worrying that the division of labor could warp individuals by not enabling them to develop different capacities and aspects of their personality — instead imposing hyper-specialization and repetition of the same dreary task over and over again. He recommended the state step in to ameliorate this problem through providing educational and cultural opportunities for the poor.
Beyond economics, Smith thought that inequality was corrosive to the morality of society as a whole. The very rich were allowed to engage in all kinds of vices and were “generally treated with a good deal of indulgence, and are easily either excused or pardoned altogether.” By contrast, the “vices of levity are always ruinous to the common people, and a single week’s thoughtlessness and dissipation is often sufficient to undo a poor workman for ever, and to drive him through despair upon committing enormous crimes.” Indeed, for Smith, admiration of the rich was the most corrupting influence on society’s morals:
This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition . . . is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.
What About Socialism?
The Greatest of All Plagues is crisply written, and it demonstrates beyond a doubt that concerns with economic inequality span the gamut of Western thinkers. Yet Williams doesn’t dedicate enough time to the important history of socialist thought on this issue.
The book does have meaty chapters on Mill and Marx that express admiration for their (very different) visions of a socialist future. But stopping the book there means that a long line of important authors less known to the general public never get their moment in the sun. This is not a problem unique to Williams. In her recent work Hijacked, the political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson gently chastises political philosophy for largely ignoring the long history of democratic socialist and social democratic thought. She writes that “in the history of political thought, no social democrat has been canonized, despite the huge influence of social democracy in many wealthy capitalist democracies.”
Anderson’s claim may be somewhat exaggerated: many leftists can rattle off a long list of important socialist and social democratic thinkers. But she is right that the list would hardly be as known to the mainstream as, say, the “canon” of conservative authors which has been well popularized. This isn’t for a want of worthy and diverse socialist and social democratic candidates, of course: Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, R. H. Tawney, Leonard Hobhouse, Simone de Beauvoir, Ernst Wigforss, Rudolf Meidner, Michael Harrington, Martin Luther King, Paul Tillich, and Angela Davis, to name just a few, come to mind.
Given the clear need to reintroduce socialist thinkers to English-speaking readers, it’s a shame Williams didn’t dedicate much if any time to them. That’s in no small part because, as Anderson notes, social democrats and democratic socialists did more than just think about economic inequality. They actively and often successfully sought to challenge it in practice. Such models are extremely useful in a contemporary era where, as Williams observes, the need to challenge economic inequality is especially urgent.
Despite this lacuna, The Greatest of All Plagues often makes for bracing reading. It succeeds in taking figures who many of us might think we are familiar with, and shows us that we didn’t know them that well at all. Williams shows that economic inequality is not only the greatest of all plagues — it is also one of the longest lasting, such that many of the most influential thinkers of several epochs felt called upon to condemn it.