Samuel Moyn in The Nation: In the chilling speech he gives at the end of the film Margin Call, Jeremy Irons says that no one should say they believe in equality, because no one really thinks it exists: The very idea camouflages the endurance of hierarchy in an essentially unchanging form. “It’s certainly no different today than it’s ever been,” he explains to an underling. “There have always been and there always will be the same percentage of winners and losers….Yeah, there may be more of us than there’s ever been, but the percentages? They stay exactly the same.”
For many others, the response to the 2008 financial crisis was very different from Irons’s cynical response. The crisis led to more consciousness and criticism of inequality than had been seen in the past 50 years. Starting with Occupy Wall Street in 2011, large numbers of Americans concerned about the ascendancy of the “1 percent” eventually consolidated around Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020. During these years, the French economist Thomas Piketty provided the reading public with evidence that vindicated the movement: In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in English in 2014, he confirmed that economic inequality had been rising across the North Atlantic world. Piketty also showed that the situation was simultaneously worse and better than the way Irons had characterized it in Margin Call: Capitalism’s inherent dynamics generally increased inequality, he argued, but political mobilizations could bring about its reduction.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a surprise bestseller, and inequality became a signature concern of the new century, analyzed and complained about (and, more rarely, justified) in a deluge of articles, books, and tweets. But a decade later, historians, economists, and political theorists are pondering a different set of questions: not about the causes or continued existence of our age of inequality, but about where the moral imperative for its opposite—equality—came from in the first place. In A Brief History of Equality, Piketty offered his own views, emphasizing how the egalitarian distribution of income and wealth in the mid–20th century has been reversed in our neoliberal era. But over the past year, a new wave of books has appeared that fundamentally broaden the terms of this now-standard account. Darrin McMahon’s ambitious Equality puts modern concerns about class disparity in their historical place. Paul Sagar’s Basic Equality provides an account of how the belief that all men are created equal emerged in the early modern period—an inquiry that Teresa Bejan also takes up in “What Was the Point of Equality?” and that will feature in her forthcoming First Among Equals. And David Lay Williams, in The Greatest of All Plagues, examines how canonical thinkers from Plato to Karl Marx took up the subject of economic hierarchy in their own work. Each of these books helps answer the question of where the ideal of equality came from. But posing that question leads to an even more pressing one: whether equality is the most important thing to begin with.
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