In this book I have tried to offer an economic, social, intellectual, and political history of inequality regimes; that is, a history of the systems by which inequality is justified and structured, from premodern trifunctional and slave societies to modern postcolonial and hypercapitalist ones. Obviously, such a project is never-ending. No book can exhaust so vast a subject. All my conclusions are tentative and fragile by their very nature. They are based on research that needs to be supplemented and extended in the future. I hope nevertheless that this book will have helped readers clarify their own ideas and their own ideologies of social equality and inequality and will stimulate further reflection on these issues.
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1848). Their assertion remains pertinent, but now that this book is done, I am tempted to reformulate it as follows: The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of the struggle of ideologies and the quest for justice. In other words, ideas and ideologies count in history. Social position, as important as it is, is not enough to forge a theory of the just society, a theory of property, a theory of borders, a theory of taxes, of education, wages, or democracy. Without precise answers to these complex questions, without a clear strategy of political experimentation and social learning, struggle does not know where to turn politically. Once power is seized, this lacuna may well be filled by political-ideological constructs more oppressive than those that were overthrown.
With the history of the twentieth century and of the communist disaster in mind, it is imperative that we carefully scrutinize today’s inequality regimes and the way they are justified. Above all, we need to understand what institutional arrangements and what types of socioeconomic organization can truly contribute to human and social emancipation. The history of inequality cannot be reduced to an eternal clash between oppressors of the people and proud defenders. On both sides one finds sophisticated intellectual and institutional constructs. To be sure, on the side of the dominant groups, these constructs are not always devoid of hypocrisy and reflect a determination to remain in power, but they still need to be studied closely. Unlike the class struggle, the struggle of ideologies involves shared knowledge and experiences, respect for others, deliberation, and democracy. No one will ever possess the absolute truth about just ownership, just borders, just democracy, just taxes and education. The history of human societies can be seen as a quest for justice. Progress is possible only through detailed comparison of personal and historical experiences and the widest possible deliberation.
Nevertheless, the struggle of ideologies and the quest for justice also entails the expression of clearly defined positions and clearly designated antagonists. Based on the experiences analyzed in this book, I am convinced that capitalism and private property can be superseded and that a just society can be established on the basis of participatory socialism and social federalism. The first step is to establish a regime of social and temporary ownership. This will require power sharing between workers and shareholders and a ceiling on the number of votes that can be cast by any one shareholder. It will also require a steeply progressive tax on property, a universal capital endowment, and permanent circulation of wealth. In addition, it implies a progressive income tax and collective regulation of carbon emissions, the proceeds from which will go to pay for social insurance and a basic income, the ecological transition, and true educational equality. Finally, the global economy will need to be reorganized by means of codevelopment treaties incorporating quantified objectives of social, fiscal, and environmental justice; liberalization of trade and financial flows must be conditioned on progress toward meeting those primary goals. This redefinition of the global legal framework will require abandonment of some existing treaties, most notably those concerning the free circulation of capital that came into effect in the 1980s–1990s because these stand in the way of meeting the above-mentioned goals. Those treaties will need to be replaced by new rules based on the principles of financial transparency, fiscal cooperation, and transnational democracy.
Some of these conclusions may seem radical. In reality, they belong to a historical movement toward democratic socialism, which since the late nineteenth century has been working toward profound transformations of the legal, social, and fiscal system. The significant reduction of inequality that took place in the mid-twentieth century was made possible by the construction of a social state based on relative educational equality and a number of radical innovations, such as co-management in the Germanic and Nordic countries and progressive taxation in the United States and United Kingdom. The conservative revolution of the 1980s and the fall of communism interrupted this movement; the world entered a new era of self-regulated markets and quasi-sacralization of property. The inability of the social-democratic coalition to move beyond the confines of the nation-state and renew its program in an era of globalized trade and expanded higher education contributed to the collapse of the left-right political system that made the postwar reduction of inequality possible. However, in the face of challenges raised by the historic resumption of inequality, the rejection of globalization, and the development of new forms of identitarian retreat, awareness of the limits of deregulated capitalism has grown rapidly since the financial crisis of 2008. People have once again begun thinking about a new, more equitable, more sustainable economic model. My discussion here of participatory socialism and social federalism draw largely on developments taking place in various parts of the world; my contribution here is simply to place them in a broader historical perspective.
The history of the inequality regimes studied in this book shows that such political-ideological transformations should not be seen as deterministic. Multiple trajectories are always possible. The balance of power at any moment depends on the interaction of the short-term logic of events with long-term intellectual evolutions from which come a wide range of ideas that can be drawn on in moments of crisis. Unfortunately, there is a very real danger that countries will try to avoid fundamental change by intensifying the competition of all against all and engaging in a new round of fiscal and social dumping. This could in turn intensify nationalist and identitarian conflict, which is already conspicuous in Europe, the United States, India, Brazil, and China.
In this book I have tried to decenter our way of looking at the history of inequality regimes. The case of India turns out to be particularly instructive. The Indian Union is an example of very large-scale democratic federalism. More than that, it shows how the state can use legal tools to overcome the heavy inegalitarian legacy of an ancient society of castes made more rigid by the encounter with British colonial power. The institutional tools that India developed to deal with this legacy took the form of quotas and “reservations” of places in universities, public employment, and elective office: places were reserved for individuals born into disadvantaged social classes that had suffered historically from discrimination. This system has not resolved all of India’s problems—far from it. But such experiences are highly instructive for the rest of the world and in particular for Western democracies, which are also dealing with enormous educational inequalities (which have long been neglected) and are just beginning to deal with multiconfessionalism (which India has known for ten centuries). More generally, I have tried to show that, to understand the world today, it is indispensable to study the long history of inequality regimes, and especially the way European proprietarian and colonial powers affected the development of non-European trifunctional societies. The traces of that lengthy history remain quite visible in the structure of contemporary inequality. Beyond that, the study of the sophisticated inegalitarian ideologies of the past helps place today’s ideologies in perspective. One sees that they are not always wiser than the ideologies that preceded them and that they, too, will someday be replaced.
Despite my efforts to decenter our gaze, I have to say that this book remains unbalanced—somewhat less so than my previous book but still quite unbalanced on the whole. The French Revolution comes up repeatedly, and the experiences of Europe and the United States are constantly cited, much more so than their demographic weight warrants. Jack Goody, in his book The Theft of History, rightly denounced the often-irresistible temptation to write history from a Western-centric point of view, which afflicts even well-intentioned social scientists. Writers attribute to Europe and America inventions they did not invent or even cultural practices such as courtly love, the love of liberty, filial affection, the nuclear family, humanism, and democracy.1 I have tried to avoid this bias in this book, but I am not sure I succeeded. The reason is simple: my gaze is profoundly influenced by my cultural roots, the limits of my knowledge, and above all by the serious weakness of my linguistic competence. This book is the work of an author who reads fluently only in French and English and who is familiar with only a limited range of primary sources. Yet this study ranges widely—perhaps too widely—and I beg the pardon of specialists in other fields for the approximations and condensations they will find here. I hope that this work will soon be complemented and superseded by many others, which will add to our understanding of specific inequality regimes, especially those in the many geographical and cultural regions poorly covered by this work.
No doubt my gaze has also been shaped by my personal history, perhaps even more than I imagine. I could describe the diversity of the social milieus and political ideas to which I was exposed by my family background. My two grandmothers suffered from the patriarchal model imposed by their generation. One was unhappy in her bourgeois life and died prematurely in Paris in 1987. The other became a servant on a farm at age 13 during World War II and died in 2018 in Indre-et-Loire. From one of my great-grandmothers, who was born in 1897 and died in 2001, I heard stories of France before 1914, when the country was preparing its revenge against Germany. Born in 1971, I obtained from my parents the freedom I needed to become an adult. As a student in 1989, I listened to the collapse of the communist dictatorships on the radio. In 1991 I listened to reports of the Gulf War. When I look at how my vision of history and economics has evolved since I was 18, I think that it was the study of history—the sources I discovered and the books I read—that led me to change my views significantly (I was initially more liberal and less socialist than I am now). In particular, writing Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century: Inequality and Redistribution, 1901–1998 made me realize in 2001 how much violence accompanied the reduction of inequality in the twentieth century. The crisis of 2008 led me to take a greater interest in the fragilities of global capitalism and the history of capital and its accumulation, subjects at the heart of Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013). The present book is based on new sources—most prominently, colonial histories and postelection surveys—which led me to develop a new political-ideological approach to inequality regimes. It is possible that this reconstruction is too rational; I may neglect the hidden effects of my early and more recent experiences in shaping this or that argument. Nevertheless, I have tried to make the reader aware of at least the conscious part of my progress by citing the historical sources, books, and other readings that led me to the positions I take here, insofar as I am aware of them.
Social scientists are very lucky. Society pays them to write books, explore sources, synthesize what can be learned from archives and surveys, and then try to pay back the people who make their work possible—namely, the rest of society. Now and then researchers in the social sciences waste too much time in sterile disciplinary quarrels and status disputes. Nevertheless, the social sciences play an indispensable role in public debate and democratic dialogue. In this book I have tried to show how the sources and methods of the various social science could be used to analyze the history of inequality regimes in their social, economic, political, and intellectual dimensions.
I am convinced that some of today’s democratic disarray stems from the fact that, insofar as the civic and political sphere is concerned, economics has cut itself free from the other social sciences. This “autonomization” of economics is partly a result of the technical nature and increasing complexity of the economic sphere. But it is also the result of a recurrent temptation on the part of professional economists, whether in the university or the marketplace, to claim a monopoly of expertise and analytic capacity they do not possess. In reality, it is only by combining economic, historical, sociological, cultural, and political approaches that progress in our understanding of socioeconomic phenomena becomes possible. This is true, of course, for the study of inequalities between social classes and their transformations throughout history, but the lesson seems to me far more general. This book draws on the work of many social scientists in many disciplines, without whom it would not exist.2 I have also tried to show how literature and film can also shed light on our subject in a way that complements the light shed by the social sciences.
Another consequence of the excessive autonomization of economics is that historians, sociologists, political scientists, and philosophers too often abandon the study of economic questions to economists. But political economy and economic history involve all the social sciences, as I have tried to show in this book. All social scientists should try to include socioeconomic trends in their analysis and gather quantitative and historical data whenever useful and should rely on other methods and sources when necessary. The neglect of quantitative and statistical sources by many social scientists is unfortunate, particularly since critical examination of the sources and the conditions under which they are socially, historically, and politically constructed is necessary to make proper use of them. This neglect has contributed not only to the autonomization of economics but also to its impoverishment. I hope that this book will help to remedy that.
Beyond the realm of research, the autonomization of economic knowledge has also been bad for the civic and political sphere because it encourages fatalism and fosters feelings of helplessness. In particular, journalists and citizens all too often bow to the expertise of economists, limited though it is, and hesitate to express opinions about wages and profits, taxes and debts, trade and capital. But if the people are to be sovereign—as democracy says they should be—these subjects are not optional. Their complexity is such that it is unjustifiable to abandon them to a small caste of experts. The contrary is true. Precisely because they are so complex, only broad collective deliberation, based on reason and on the past history and experience of every citizen, can lead to progress toward resolving these issues. Ultimately, this book has only one goal: to enable citizens to reclaim possession of economic and historical knowledge. Whether or not the reader agrees with my specific conclusions basically does not matter because my purpose is to begin debate, not to end it. If this book has been able to awaken the reader’s interest in new questions and enlighten her with knowledge she did not previously possess, my goal will have been fully achieved.
1. See J. Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
2. Among the researchers whose recent and not-so-recent work I have relied on most heavily, I would like to mention Mathieu Arnoux, Rafe Blaufarb, Erik Bengtsson, Denis Cogneau, Fredrick Cooper, Nicolas Barreyre, Julia Cagé, Noam Maggor, Katrina Pistor, Sanjay Subrahmanyan, Serge Gruzinski, Susan Bayly, Ken Pomeranz, Hannah Arendt, Karl Polanyi, Or Rosenboim, Barbara Wooton, Christophe Jaffrelot, etc. Dozens of other authors are cited in the footnotes to each chapter.