The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of The Idea of Economic Inequality in America

The contours of the Western political tradition show a deep and enduring concern with the problem of economic inequality. The critique of economic inequality seems to be a fairly consistent theme because it was always bound to the discussion of how to govern with justice, or at least with some degree of order. This motivation is interesting because, unlike the approach of many scholars to the question of the emergence of equality as a political ideal in Western political thought, it indicates that economic inequality was not critiqued simply because it was seen as morally wrong but because it was viewed as a concrete social ill that would, more often than not, erode social cohesion, create political fragmentation, and even, in its worst instances, lead to the dissolution of the political community itself. Over time, this becomes a consistent critique that can be seen throughout Western political thought and, I think, constitutes a coherent intellectual tradition. It is a tradition that stretches back to the classical world, receives ample treatment from radical Christian thought, and was given renewed vigor during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the discourse of antimonarchism and antifeudal ideology began to bloom.

Roughly speaking, there exist two broad conceptions of economic equality in Western political thought. The first, which we can call the utopian or strict form of equality, argues that only a communal sharing of social wealth and property—usually an elimination of private property—will result in true social justice. The other type of equality argues that a toleration of small gaps of inequality between social groups or classes is permissible to the extent that the political and social power between those groups does not diverge to a significant degree. The importance of this distinction should not be overlooked or underemphasized since the two types are frequently in conflict. Therefore, the core axis around which the discourse on economic inequality rotates is not, in fact, competing conceptions of economic or social equality but the adverse effects of inequality itself. Thinkers throughout the Western political tradition have seen in economic inequality the seeds for the unraveling of society; the creation of social divisions and dissension; the corruption of ideas of the public good; and, finally, the erosion of any conception of political or individual freedom through the creation of unequal relations of power such as oligarchy and aristocracy.

The importance of sketching the continuity of the critique of economic inequality throughout Western political thought lies in its power to illuminate the way that this tradition saw that economic divisions of power were intimately tied to political imbalances of power; to show how an integrated political life was an outgrowth of some degree of economic equality; and finally to demonstrate how the critics of economic inequality were able to identify the link between economic disparities and social justice. These critics were aware that unequal property led to unequal power—and those concerned with justice and freedom throughout Western political thought confronted these issues on a regular basis. Consistently, the Western political tradition has shown a concern for lessening economic inequalities and promoting social and political harmony and integration at the expense of economic divisions of power, and this forms a crucial part of the tradition itself. In contrast to modern ideas on the subject, the economy was seen as subordinate to the political; and it was for this reason that the anti-aristocratic impulse that emerged with the Enlightenment could also find affinity with the republican impulses of Greek and Roman political thought.¹ The relation between economic equality and political stability, the enhancement of human liberty, and the desire to prevent the excess of political power in the hands of the few and construct republican institutions that were in agreement with these broad political aims are all therefore informed by this long egalitarian tradition in Western political thought.

Since the rise of market societies in the Mediterranean world, inequalities of wealth and property have been the cause of endless strife and social and political fragmentation. In the Bible, injunctions against inequality of wealth and property are numerous. The Jewish and Christian traditions warned specifically against advocating for the rich at the expense of the poor, and this inevitably translated into many ethical notions and values in Western political thought. However, it was in classical philosophy, in Greece primarily, that the discourse on economic inequality became paramount and concerns with its effects on political life and social cohesion became central. Thinkers as diverse as Hegel and Matthew Arnold, as well as David Hume and John Stuart Mill, were steeped in the political philosophy of Greek thinkers, and it was the notion of the polis that informed many of their ideas about social solidarity in the face of political and economic fragmentation. Their aversion to inequality arose from a conception—although admittedly sometimes vague—of public good, which was put in danger by the reality of political fragmentation and strife caused by the excesses of economic inequality.

But what is central to the discourse on economic inequality in Western political thought emerged in the ancient world and its concern with restraining what its thinkers saw as “perverted” forms of government—that is, those forms of political life where the few ruled over the many and the public good was trampled by the wealthy, powerful, and elite. This “classical republican” tradition consistently saw that inequality in economic terms would lead toward such perversions of government. They saw that what was required was not a utopian form of equality but a set of institutions and laws—and hopefully a civic culture as well—that would limit the excesses of wealth and poverty. This tradition necessarily begins with the Greeks and their concern for the relationship between inequality in property and the existence of stable political communities.² What is so important in Greek thought over the Jewish and Christian traditions and their moralistic injunctions against inequality is the fact that the Greeks attempted to understand unequal distinctions between human beings in a material and sociological context.³ What Greek thought made evident was that economic inequality was a distinctly political concern, that it had deep social implications, not to mention moral ones, and that material inequities between different classes and individuals would erode the possibility of a community of free citizens and even, in the most extreme cases, effect a weakening of social solidarity and the dissolution of the political community itself. Economic power was tied with political and social power, and it is this aspect of the Greek discourse on economic inequality that serves as a foundation for later European and American understandings of inequality and its effects.

An examination of the historical continuity of the idea of inequality is important, first of all, to show how much of a deviation the modern turn against equality is from the Western political tradition as a whole. It is, of course, true that very few thinkers within the tradition ever advocated a radical form of equality—an absolute equality in property, for instance—but what is also true and essential to see is that there is a consistent notion that the sphere of politics must protect against extreme forms of inequality not simply because of ethics but for reasons more fundamental: that economic inequalities lead ineluctably toward social and political fragmentation and that, even for thinkers such as Plato who were not democratic, the very cohesion and even the possibility of the existence of society was threatened by exacerbated inequalities, which cause social divisions and threaten the harmonious relations among individuals within the political community. The coherence of this position extends from the political philosophy of the Greeks through the Enlightenment and modern liberalism, even though there are changes to the doctrine in each of these periods.

Most important among these various changes has been how modern ways of thinking about political life tend to exclude more and more the impact of the market. A crucial dimension in the recent transformation of the discourse on economic inequality in Western political thought has been the shift from what one could call political society to economic society. In the past, economics was seen as a corollary to political life, subordinate to the needs of society and therefore, as Max Weber remarked, a branch of political science. We tend to see things differently today: the economy is no longer viewed as a component of political life; it is seen as a separate system altogether. The result has been a violent tearing of homo politicus from homo oeconomicus; a depoliticization of economic life has emerged; and economic inequality has escaped the critiques that were leveled against it throughout Western political thought. Having lost touch with this tradition, we have become less trenchant in our critiques of economic inequality, less able to see the ways it leads inevitably to inequalities in social and political power, and blind to the ways that it can, and indeed has, diluted civil society and civic virtue. The insight that economic inequality can fray a republic based on equality no longer lingers in the air—and it is for this reason that the Western discourse on economic inequality needs to be seen for its concrete contributions.

The trajectory and development of the discourse on economic inequality throughout ancient and early-modern political thought sets the stage for the way that the discourse of economic ideas was framed in the American political consciousness. One of the most important issues in understanding the relation of economic inequality to politics is the way that the economy was interpreted as an institution. Today, it is customary to approach the economy simply as a formal system of exchange, prices, production, and distribution, an amoral institution working according to its own internal logic. This is the result of the distinction between what was known as the “natural economy” and the “moral economy,” a distinction that stretches back to antiquity and to the Aristotelian emphasis on the insight that the economy was subordinate to political and moral concerns of the broader community rather than to self-interest and accumulation.⁴ Karl Polanyi makes the important distinction between a formal and substantive understanding of the meaning of the word “economic”:

Morality and politics were therefore both deeply entwined in older conceptions of the economy and the distribution of its fruits. More important, the idea of property and its “proper use” was a discourse that began in classical thought where economics, politics, and morality were inseparable. Polanyi also makes this point by pointing to the fact that the ancient economy was one that was “embedded in non-economic institutions.”⁶ The concept of economic inequality as a danger—both morally and politically—to the unity of society as a whole and as a matter of justice itself was first lucidly raised in Greek thought. Greek political and moral thought had to wrestle with the implications of a market society that, especially in a place such as Athens in the fifth century B.C., had become highly successful economically as well as extremely unequal with respect to the distribution of wealth.

When early American thinkers began to write and think about the meaning of the economy and its function and purpose, they, too, would need to confront the moral aspects of the economic system that the new nation would encourage. Indeed, one aspect of justifying inequality in American thought has been achieved by transforming the relation between morality and economics. Whereas the early American political thinkers were concerned with the moral and political consequences of property and its distribution—although there was no consensus on this—from the era of industrialism well on to the present, there has been a dissociation of economics, property, and markets from morality and politics. Whether it was Thomas Jefferson’s critical views of an incipient industrial capitalism, John Adams’s belief that inequality would surely rise with the economic development of the nation, or Alexander Hamilton’s promotion of industry and manufacturing as a means to higher social progress and civilization, these early American thinkers were all attempting to redefine the proper moral structure for American economic life. For this reason, all discussions of economic inequality in American political thought need to see it as embedded in a much broader discourse, not only because this was the intellectual background for these debates and the formulation of American political ideas but also because it is crucial to see how drastic a change has occurred over time in the development of America’s political and economic ideas.

In book 8 of his Republic, Plato has Socrates recount a mythic tale of a city containing two distinct groups who, as a result of their different attitudes toward money and wealth, undergo a period of strife that threatens the entire political community. The first group, the “iron and bronze,” were drawn toward “money-making and the acquisition of land and houses and gold and silver.” The other group, made up the people of gold and silver, who were “not poor, but by nature rich in their souls, were trying to draw them back to virtue.”⁷ The people of gold and silver, unable to curb the appetite of the people of iron and bronze, are forced to enslave them as serfs, perpetually watching over them since their appetitive nature had been forever transformed by their lust for riches and wealth. The central fear of the thinkers of antiquity was that the moral character of individuals would become corrupted by excessive desire for the accumulation of property and material goods since this would lead them away from social concerns and a life of virtue—by which they meant an ethical orientation toward the political community—and toward self-interest, thereby creating factions, internal strife and competition, and the erosion of the harmony and order that a just political society was supposed to possess.

In this sense, the mythic tale buried in Plato’s Republic was not meant as a justification for oligarchy but rather as an illustration of how the Greeks viewed the problem of economic inequality: not simply as an issue of economics but as a symptom of perverted souls bent on avarice and the love of acquisition for the sake of acquisition (philochrēmaton). Political and indeed moral virtue were therefore crucial categories for Greek thinkers and their particular approach to the problem of economic inequality. The roots of their arguments place political virtue over economic acquisition, value the public good over private interest, and see the problem of justice and social cohesion as fundamental to judging economic transactions and activity.

The philosophical and ethical backdrop for the entire discourse on inequality in classical Greek thought is the idea of a cohesive, harmonized political community, one whose very viability was at risk once social classes became more stratified and the animosity among the poor toward the rich became increasingly disruptive or the power of wealthy oligarchs began to erode any sense of social solidarity among citizens in the community. Economic inequalities therefore posed a threat to the communitarian basis of Greek political society and what was at stake in the discussion of inequality was therefore the preservation of society itself at the expense of political and, even more serious, social fragmentation and the unraveling of the polis, the central form of political life.

This discourse begins in the first decades of the fourth century B.C. in Greece and continues until the Roman conquest in the middle of the second century B.C. New economic processes began to have a severe impact on the economic life of ordinary people. First, there was a decline in small and medium landholding as property began to agglomerate into fewer and fewer hands, resulting in large agricultural properties owned by a small but powerful elite. Second, there was the emergence, through the growth of trade and small-scale manufactures, of a quasi-capitalist economic system, especially in cities such as Athens and Sparta. This meant the decline of the agricultural middle class, something that had been a constant in Greek economic life from the Persian Wars through the end of the Peloponnesian War.

These structural economic changes led to a new awareness by philosophers, writers and poets of what has been called the “social problem” of classical Greece, defined essentially by what was commonly discussed at the time as “poverty and riches” (penia kai ploutos).⁸ Economic inequality was such a serious problem that much of the literature of the time is replete with this theme.⁹ Aristophanes’ final two plays, Ecclesiazusae and Ploutos, are both about the elimination of economic polarities and the foundation of wholly new and utopian economic systems where absolute equality reigns and private property is eliminated.¹⁰ Economic equality is seen as a panacea, the solution for all of the “sore evils” (anakesta kakon) of society, and even though Aristophanes clearly intended his egalitarian utopias as comic, the idea that such a theme would have appealed at all to Athenians shows how much the problem of material inequalities was of major importance. It is a theme that is also present in other literature of the time. The Holy Writing by Euphemeros envisions an imaginary city, “Panachia,” where there is no private property outside of one’s home and a small plot of land surrounding it and everyone works according to his abilities and receives according to his needs (although the class of priests are given twice their share). Utopian visions of absolute economic equality are also seen in Iambolous’ Island of the Sun, where a communistic society exists in a state of complete equality and brotherhood and without competition and social strife.¹¹

This theme also emerges in Plato’s Republic, where he observes that the nature of the modern city consists of “not one, but two states, the one of the poor and the other of rich men; and they live on the same spot and are always conspiring against one another.”¹² The problem with inequality is raised in the Republic where the very conception of justice and the just city is taken up, in part, in relation to the distribution of property. The idea of economic equality arises explicitly in response to what many thinkers saw at the time as the increasing fragmentation of the polis—especially in Athens—as wealth disparities grew and society was fundamentally divided between an ever richer mercantile class and large-scale agricultural property owners, on the one hand, and workers, slaves, and small-scale farmers, on the other.¹³ Plato’s views on the problem of economic inequality are grounded in his broader view of the just polis. This ideal of justice emphasizes the importance of privileging the whole over its constituent parts and the promotion of harmony among the different social segments of the political community and its various classes, and it is in this that we begin to see the birth of the classical republican tradition with respect to economic inequality. When discussing the ideal city in book 4 of the Republic, Plato has Socrates say:

Justice is not to be found in good acts or in the mere existence of “just” laws and virtuous rulers. More important, justice is found in the arrangement of social structure itself; it is manifest in the specific way that the polis is organized, with all having equal shares because each class depends on the activities of all others. The promotion of economic equality is therefore part and parcel of the project of building a just city. Plato’s Republic therefore privileges economic equality in the light of a broader political and moral concern for social solidarity and the desire to prevent the fragmentation of community and the dissolution of political society itself. Economic inequality is not viewed simply in the light of justice or fairness, it is also, and to a certain extent more essentially, seen as crucial to the very survival of the political community itself.

The general view of social harmony and wholeness informs the classical republican idea, and it is central in understanding the basic foundations for the discourse of economic equality in Western thought. Plato, as well as other Greek thinkers of the period, saw that the institution of the polis was something that was naturally formed not something that existed naturally. The difference is crucial: individuals come together for mutual support and to take advantage of the different abilities that each individual, family, or class has to offer. Society flourishes only when it is efficient and each person is able to dedicate himself to his task and therefore enrich the totality of the polis—individual self-sufficiency is dependent on the maintenance of the social totality, a theme that would also emerge in American political thought on the subject of inequality. The ethical-political ideas that Plato advocates in the Republic are therefore not metaphysical concepts; they are a function of the vision of the material operation of a just society and the specific type of harmony that he valued. The necessity for economic equality flows from the realization that for justice to be made real in the world, people ought not to be treated differently but with equality, since each in his own way contributes to the good of the whole. This was not only a moral concern; since the economic foundation of the state lies in the cooperative nature of citizens, this, in turn, means that the state found its very legitimacy and binding force in human need itself: in the idea that man is a political animal, as Aristotle would later articulate it.¹⁵ Hence, economic disparities did not simply spell injustice; they were a prelude to the breakdown of the cohesion that held society together.¹⁶ But even more, there was a growing sense that the emerging principles of equality and freedom that were developing in the Greek city-states were coming into opposition with the economic life of the time.¹⁷ Throughout the fourth century B.C. in many of the Greek city-states, as well as Greek islands such as Syracuse, Cos, Lesbos, and Naxos, among others, there were political revolutions that had as their underlying justification the redistribution of property as well as economic and social equality and the abolition of debts.¹⁸

The problem of the fragmentation of the polis as a result of increasing economic polarity is one of the key messages behind Isocrates’ attack on inequality and the degeneration of the Athenian polis in his orations. In his Areopagiticus he recalls a golden age of Athens, when “the wealthy were better pleased to see men borrowing money than paying it back. For they therefore experienced the double satisfaction, which should appeal to all right-minded men, of helping their fellow citizens and at the same time making their property productive for themselves.”¹⁹ For Isocrates, the key was a sharing by the wealthy with the poor, on a voluntary basis motivated by an ethical impulse for social solidarity. The great social problem of ancient Greece, “poverty versus wealth,” was therefore to be solved not by a radical egalitarianism—as advocated in the literature of the time and in Plato’s Republic—but through a voluntary sharing of property by the rich with the poor through the impulse of their (the wealthy’s) morality and their devotion to the polis itself. It was a political concern with the public good that would motivate all citizens to lessen inequality, promote social solidarity, and leave egoism and greed behind. Isocrates saw the tendency to ease social and material inequalities as the moral basis for the polis, and he saw that the growth and expansion of markets and inequalities in wealth and property created a lapse in both public and private morality. Economic inequality was therefore dangerous to the moral fabric of society and the individual, and it implied a much wider form of social breakdown than “mere” political injustice. It was therefore not the case that the argument for economic equalities existed from the start only in utopian form, one that saw the leveling of all distinctions and abilities. Rather, some saw the solution to the social fragmentation and political disintegration that arose from the resentment of economic polarity as the pursuit of a middle path between the excesses of property and wealth and the utopian visions of absolute equality and communal ownership.²⁰

Plato, too, saw this to be the case about twenty years after writing his Republic. Rigorous forms of equality were, as Kurt Raaflaub has argued, “not a serious issue, and belonged in the sphere of comic surrealism and abstract theoretical schemes,”²¹ which meant that more pragmatic solutions needed to be found, as Isocrates himself had hinted in his orations. In his Laws, Plato argues that inequalities of wealth may in fact be unavoidable and it is therefore necessary to concentrate on narrowing the gap between rich and poor rather than seeking to eliminate it completely.²² He argues that this can be done through state laws that would not allow the level of inequality between its richest and poorest members to exceed a factor of four. As John Wallach has observed, Plato’s intention was the minimization of social conflict through the narrowing of economic disparities: “This relatively small gap in the material conditions of rich and poor is necessary to facilitate political action, prevent disputes from arising among citizens, and achieve the greatest possible unity of the polis.”²³ Unlike in the Republic, Plato is not trying to argue here for some utopian schema that will be the blueprint for the ideal state; rather, he is attempting to deal pragmatically with the seemingly natural inequalities that spring up within market society and mandate a form of equality that, although not strict and absolute in nature, can still mollify the social and political disintegration that economic inequities necessarily cause.

Isocrates, then, initiates a new perspective on the discourse on inequality: that of “moderation” (or what the Greeks themselves termed metriotēs). For both Isocrates and the later Plato, the concern becomes how we can narrow and then manage inequalities rather than trying to eradicate them completely. Both insist not on a strict and absolute communistic form of economic equality, as advanced in the Republic and the utopian literature of the period, but on the revival of a civic morality where the rich voluntarily help the poor (Isocrates) or on laws, implemented by the state, that will not tolerate class inequalities beyond a certain, fixed measure (Plato’s Laws).

Both of these concerns merge in Aristotle’s treatment of the problem of economic inequality. Aristotle’s take on the issue of material equality is most developed in his discussion of political science in the Politics, but it has roots in his discussion of justice in the Nicomachean Ethics. In his ethical formulation of justice, Aristotle argues that the unjust man is one who “breaks the law and the man who takes more than his share, the unfair man. Hence it is clear that the law abiding man and the fair man will both be just.”²⁴ For Aristotle, the terms for “taking more than one’s share” (pleonektes) and the “unfair” (anisos) are important categories in discussing the problem of justice. The concept of pleonexia is central to the moral dimensions of economics for the Greeks since it is more equivalent to greed and rapacity than to the more polite rendering—and the one preferred by John Stuart Mill—of taking more than one’s share.²⁵ But the key insight that the Nicomachean Ethics puts forth is the notion that there is some kind of median amount of possessions, which one can exceed and therefore become unfair (anisos) and then unjust (adikos).²⁶ The dynamics of the economy were not to be seen simply in individualistic terms. Grounded in broader concerns of moral life and community (koinonia), the economy was to be “subordinate to the broader communal and political needs of the polis.”²⁷

Although Aristotle is typically seen as the political antidote to the theory of the Platonic state, in the sense that he advocated private property over that of common property, his notion of equality—although not as radical in its impulses as the ideas of Plato and Isocrates and other thinkers of the time—is that there be a manageable inequality between classes and that the rule be a moderate equality rather than extremes of wealth and poverty, like Plato’s mandate in the Laws.²⁸ Aristotle’s distinction in the Politics among three classes, the wealthy (euoroi), the poor (aporoi), and the middle class (mesoi) was made not only in an attempt to solve the problem of internal social conflict and the instability that would result but also a means of producing a political regime where social relations were not characterized by master-slave relations. In this sense, the problem of political subjugation (douleuein) emerges when either extreme—the wealthy or the poor—obtains power since they then rule in their own interests at the expense of the rest of the community.²⁹ Aristotle sees political societies as tending toward two kinds of institutions, both of which arise from unequal property relations. First, there is oligarchy, which arises from the concentration of property and wealth among the few, and the second is democracy, where all are relatively equal in terms of property and political power. The problem, as Aristotle sees it, is that both forms of organization are imperfect since they both lead to social instability. Oligarchy is the worst of the two, since “in oligarchies two sorts of faction arise: one among the oligarchs themselves and another against the people.”³⁰ Democracies are also prone to social unrest since “the only faction is against the oligarchs since there is none worth mentioning among the people themselves.”³¹ This leads Aristotle to his basic position on equality and its political implications: “a constitution based on the middle classes is closer to a democracy than to an oligarchy, and it is the most secure constitution of its kind.”³² This is clearly not the equality of Plato’s Republic; it is specifically defined in opposition to that form of communistic equality (koinonesantes) that, according to Aristotle, Plato advocates. Aristotle offers a justification for moderation; an argument for the attenuation of material inequalities of property and political-power differentials to which they give rise; and the creation and maintenance of a more secure, and therefore more just, political society based on an approximate equality grounded in the middle class.

Aristotle’s fear of social and political faction (stasis) is not unlike that of James Madison in his “Federalist 10,” where he predicts that social divisions based on competing and clashing economic interests will cause political fragmentation and even the possibility of social breakdown or some other kind of political domination such as tyranny or oligarchy. But even more than this, what Aristotle opens up—as did Plato and Isocrates before him—is the way that economic inequality can pervert political life. All these writers are specific about the ways that economic imbalances of wealth and property lead to ambition, injustice, and the impossibility of what was for them the true aim of government: the maintenance of “eudaimonia,” the “good life.” This is the real essence of the contribution of classical thought to the problem of economic inequality and the need for some form of egalitarianism with respect to the attenuation of excessive disparities of wealth. The problem of unevenly distributed power and wealth is not simply ethical in nature; it is, as we saw in Isocrates and Plato, a central concern for what Aristotle himself terms a “secure constitution.” This arises from his discussion of revolution in book 5 of his Politics. The secure constitution guards against political divisions, economic factions, and the disintegration of the community. And at its base lies the need for preserving some degree of economic equality, “to make all attempts to mix together the multitude of the poor and that of the wealthy or to increase the middle class (for this dissolves party factions arising from inequality.)”³³ This constitutional idea is more just in the sense that “justice is the common benefit,” which is the guiding principle in Aristotle’s conception of political justice. Aristotle’s conception of politics is anthropological in nature: he sees the polis as the institution that defines the human subject. Unlike later liberal theories of the prepolitical nature of man, Greek thought—and Aristotle in particular—saw that it is in the mutuality of man’s existence that politics and justice were created.

But even more, Aristotle’s discussion of the problem of the imbalance of wealth was meant to connect more closely to his theory of constitutions. Aristotle is clear that the polis as an institution was one created by people themselves as a free association of citizens. Economic inequality would lead to a clear imbalance of political power resulting in the destruction of the free association of citizens through the imposition of relations of servitude.³⁴ The essence of Aristotle’s argument was to prevent what he called “deviations” (parekbasis) from “right constitutions” (orthai politeiai). What distinguished right from “perverted” (hēmartēmenai) constitutions was the fact that they were framed with the aim of the common interest; deviant constitutions contained elements of despotism where certain groups or individuals ruled for their own benefit at the expense of the common interest of the polis. This ethical-political vantage point was one that informed the problem of economic inequality since disparities in wealth would lead to corruption and to deviant constitutions.

Roman thought differed in many respects from the Greek conception of economic inequality. Central to the Romans was the problem of legal relationships and the protection of private property.³⁵ Cicero makes it clear that one of the primary duties of anyone serving in government office is to “make it his first care that everyone has what belongs to him and that the right of private citizens’ property rights is not violated by the state.”³⁶ His remarks on the issue of the equal distribution of property are clear in the same passage, several lines later, when, commenting on the speech by Philippus³⁷ advocating such a policy, he says that “this speech deserves unqualified condemnation, for it favored an equal distribution of wealth of property; and what more ruinous policy than that can be conceived? For the chief purpose in establishing a constitutional state and municipal governments was so that individual property rights would be secured.”³⁸ But it would be misleading to leave the discussion here. Cicero, as well as other Roman thinkers on the subject, saw that the relationship between economic life and political life was a precarious one. To have a secure set of property rights was, of course, crucial, but at the same time, the worshiping of wealth would surely lead to moral corruption.³⁹

In his De re publica, Cicero provides a more nuanced analysis of the problem of wealth inequality and its relation to political and social power. His main concern is not simply with preventing social fragmentation and preserving order but with the maintenance of a free nation (libero populo), by which he means the ability of citizens to possess full control over the laws and administration of justice within the republic. Cicero’s republicanism is therefore explicitly concerned with the issue of social power that can be derived through wealth since he points to the ways that private wealth can distort the laws and workings of republican government. “When one person or a few stand out from the crowd as richer and more prosperous, then, as a result of their haughty and arrogant behavior, there arises [a government of one or a few], the cowardly and weak giving way and bowing down to the pride of wealth.”⁴⁰ Cicero is able to point to the deformation of republican government under the influence of wealth and the imbalance it creates. It is not that he advocates the redistribution of property by the state, but rather that laws are to be made so that the possession of wealth remains a private affair, never becoming a public one. Laws are therefore to be crafted to treat all citizens equally, irrespective of their economic status:

Despite this, Cicero was unable to see that the private wealth of citizens could in effect still distort the principles and practice of republican government. But he was able to see the ways that economic inequality was antithetical to republican government and political life. It is true that his ideas were still directed against the interests of the poor, seeing them as a potential danger to the stability of the republic. Rome was divided between defenders of the republic and oligarchic rule (optimates) and those that sought reform through land redistribution (populares). Cicero’s republicanism was opposed to the reformist tendencies of the populares but also to the rule of the wealthy. His opposition to the populares was not completely ill founded: no Roman of Cicero’s time would have been able to forget the tumult caused when Tiberius Gracchus sought to institute his agrarian land law (lex Sempronia agraria), which was meant to dissolve control by a small group of wealthy land owners and redistribute land held by the state to the populace. These reforms were opposed by the optimates and led to the downfall and murder of Gracchus amid a riot between his supporters and the supporters of the senate. The opposition populist reformers who aimed at land redistribution were a genuine concern in Rome, but attempts at legislating these reforms rarely succeeded in changing social structure.

What we must look at is not simply the way that thinkers such as Cicero came down on the issue of economic inequality but rather the way that they articulated the relation between wealth seeking and the sphere of politics. The broader aim of political life for classical thinkers, of whom Cicero is only one of the more articulate exemplars, was the protection of the public good in the face of private interests so that citizens could live a life bereft of subjugation and domination and free from the interference of others. They saw economic inequality not simply as an empirical reality produced naturally by competing interests but more likely as a result of moral corruption itself. Plato refers to it as philochrēmaton, the “love of wealth”; both Plato and Aristotle also use the term chrēmatistikon, or the “art of wealth seeking”; and Cicero refers to the “worshiping of wealth” (admiratione divitiarum). But irrespective of the name, they saw the ascendance of economic life over political life as fatal for republican government. By seeing that economic inequality was a crucial problem for such a form of political association, classical thinkers were able to point to the ability of economic life to be effectively political, and this itself constitutes a distinct contribution to the way that the concept of economic inequality would be viewed by later thinkers, especially in the formative years of the American republic.

When economies began to grow once again in Europe and trade expanded in the later Middle Ages, new concerns over inequality began to emerge. Machiavelli’s Discorsi argues that the only way to preserve a republic of free citizens is in the limitation of unequal wealth (see book 1, chap. 55). The relation between civic equality and economic equality was seen to be inherently linked since extremes of wealth and poverty led to either corruption or the desire for revolution: “Let, then, a republic be constituted where there exists, or can be brought into being, notable equality.”⁴² But by the eighteenth century, there had already been countless peasant revolts, many of them now seen to be organized around the interests of economic equality and the redistribution of property.⁴³ Economic inequality was therefore something that, even though it had yet to become a major concern of modern political philosophy, was still a palpable issue at the level of everyday people.

But the modern perspective on economic inequality is not simply the result of a carrying over of the classical republican tradition. It was also given its most important weight at the outset by the theological forces unleashed by the Reformation and the new idea of the political subject that it unleashed. It is crucial to see that the central problem that Reformation thought was able to put forth was a radical antihierarchical ethos. This initially took a theological form with the antiecclesiastical impulse of Luther’s ideas, but it took on a broader relevance in the world as a radical notion of egalitarianism that began to transform the way both the reformers and the reformed viewed the political landscape. “A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; A Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone,”⁴⁴ writes Luther, but it is important to interpret this correctly since by not being subject to earthly domination, the Christian man is able to be a servant to public life. In many ways, this was a continuation of the humanism that developed during the Renaissance, but in others, it was a unique turn in the way that secular political power ought to be organized, what was legitimate and what was not.⁴⁵ This turn was important since it added a new push toward the idea of political equality. With the more radical separation between society and politics, on the one hand, and the religious subject, on the other, the domain of the political was now severed from the conceptions of order and hierarchy that characterized the feudal world.

Because of this separation, new ideas about equality and inequality began to emerge. Economic life became central once again to the nature of political life, but this time in a different guise: now the idea of salvation was tied to individual effort, to work. This meant that a shift in power to those who earned their living through honest labor from those who did not became a crucial concern for a middle class whose rise was itself propelled by the Price Revolution during the sixteenth century.⁴⁶ The significance of this concern was that a new idea about economic inequality—a liberal one—would emerge that was different from, although not incompatible with, the classical republican notion of economic equality. Both individualist and emancipating in their outlook, the new ideas of liberalism that were unleashed by the Reformation gave a religious cast to economic and political life. Instead of the Catholic doctrine of “works,” virtue was expressed in industriousness and frugality, and this new thought “condemns as corrupt privileged aristocrats and leisured gentlefolk.”⁴⁷ The impact of this on ideas about economic inequality was complex and would unfold over a long period of time. But suffice it to say for the context of the present discussion that the main target of dissent was not economic inequality in and of itself—for the Dissenters and other radical Protestant groups (mainly in England, where they were most successful politically), the problem was an outdated feudalism that took wealth and privilege away from those who labored honestly. This would translate into an antifeudal and antiaristocratic radicalism, but it was aimed primarily at feudal institutions and the state. The economy was seen as corrupted by these institutions; if it were to be left alone, unfettered by the distortions of patronage and privilege, it would produce its own form of equality.

The cause of economic inequality was therefore not honest economic activity but the corruption of the idle rich. This new attitude toward political and secular life brought forth the notion that the individual was central in upholding a political order that had shed the hierarchy of man over man. This introduces a crucial twist in the way that the relation between politics and economics would be perceived, for if it is the case that individual economic activity is a source of salvation, then the economic activity of individuals becomes sacred, protected by a natural right, à la Locke. This leads to a situation where private property and the market could be defended on the grounds of human liberty against the excesses of the state and the aristocracy. But despite this, the classical republican idea about economic inequality persisted. American thought would, in the beginning, seek to mesh the republican and liberal ideas—and this synthesis is at the heart of the present study.

The emergence of the idea of natural rights did not diminish the persistence of the classical republican conception of economic equality, however. The problem of the concentration of wealth and property became an explicit cause for reform during the Enlightenment. The discourse on economic inequality during this time was intimately tied to the problem of political power and political inequality. Whereas the discourse on political equality was a more pervasive one in England with the Levellers’” An Agreement of the People” delivered to Parliament in 1649 and the ideas of Hobbes and Locke coming shortly thereafter, these arguments were made largely by an emerging middle class that owned property and sought political rights and equality within an outmoded political and social order.⁴⁸ But even for Locke, inequalities in the distribution of property were an essential moral concern—his Second Treatise of Government argues that excessive accumulation, to the point where others lack the means to support their own lives, is a violation of natural law, defined as the treatment by each person of every other as equal and fair.

But the classical republican tradition would remain the more vital lens through which the problem of economic inequality would be viewed. Somewhat earlier, James Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) advocated a largely egalitarian division of property through “agrarian law.” This was to be achieved by requiring the owners of large estates to divide their property equally among male heirs. Harrington saw the nature of the political parties that would emerge out of unequal divisions of property and advocated equality to enhance the prosperity of the commonwealth and the liberty of each individual: “equality of estates causes equality of power, and equality of power is the liberty, not only of the commonwealth, but of every man.”⁴⁹ Harrington’s republican model was one that saw the obvious links between economic and political power and sought to construct an argument that would unite the concerns of the liberty of the individual with an equality of political and economic power. Calling for a “balance of property,” Harrington believed that this was not only the one possible way to sustain a republican form of government but also that it would form a culture of equality that would be more robust than previous cultures of the servitude of men under men.⁵⁰

But as with the turn in Greek thought on the subject, the pervasive argument for economic equality during the Enlightenment throughout Europe was not one of radical egalitarianism but a critique of inequality and the promotion of social harmony through remedying the excesses of economic disparities. The return of the classical republican notion of economic equality was not seen as utopian. These thinkers were well aware that an exact equality of property and wealth was not possible. But thinkers in the republican tradition would construct an argument for economic equality on the basis that the political power of any polity could never be equal as long as wealth was unequally distributed. This was an equality that would need to be enshrined in law in order to protect the public good from those who would seek to dominate others. “In monarchies and despotic governments,” writes Montesquieu, “nobody aims at equality; this does not so much as enter their thoughts; they all aspire to superiority. People of the very lowest condition desire to emerge from their obscurity, only to lord it over their fellow-subjects.”⁵¹ Montesquieu’s republican argument hinged on the substantive notion of equality—not simply equality under the law but also laws that would regulate economic affairs toward the end of equality. Even though this could never be accomplished with exactness, it was still necessary for republican government:

The classical republican critique of extreme inequalities of wealth or property remains one of the most important, long-standing traditions in Western political thought on the subject of economic equality. Indeed, as were the Greeks, Enlightenment thinkers were concerned with the social and political repercussions of economic divisions since their overall concern was the ways that a republic could be formed and the excesses of oligarchy, monarchy, and aristocracy avoided. They saw that such inequalities would not only threaten the viability of a republic but also that their eradication was the only way out of the problem of human servitude and subjection that had characterized previous history. Their aim was to promote human liberty, and this could not be achieved where economic divisions left the opportunity open for an elite to make citizens into subjects. Unequal wealth and property would lead to this servitude—republicanism, on the other hand, would ensure that these divisions would be kept in check so as to prevent the concentration of power in a few hands and the inevitable descent into subjection for the many. Even as Enlightenment thinkers clearly celebrated the newly created market system of the emerging bourgeoisie—which many of them saw tied to an ethos of modern freedom and human progress through economic development and growth—they were also consistently skeptical about the different political interests that the middle classes produced and the problems of social division that resulted from the operations of the market and the accumulation of wealth and property. The idea that the expansion of the market and commerce would refine the sentiments of man and, in Albert Hirschman’s words, “restrain the arbitrary actions and excessive power plays of the sovereign”⁵³ was one adopted by many Enlightenment thinkers, and it is this tension between the market and the notions of republican equality that has become central in American ideas about economic inequality.

This was the case even for Adam Smith. Although he does not argue for a radical form of equality, his position is that economic interest comes at the expense of public interest:

Smith was hardly naïve as to the relationship among economic power, property, and civil government. He follows this general trend of arguing against the inequality of wealth and property in defense of civil harmony: “Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality, instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”⁵⁵ This was a common concern of many who saw the ills of inequality; it was not always the weak and the poor they were seeking to protect. But despite Smith’s fear of social dissension arising from the propertyless—a fear shared by Aristotle as well as Plato—Smith does end up arguing something similar to the Greeks’ concern that extreme inequalities can only have a detrimental impact on society as a whole and its “happiness”:

Aside from the issue of civic morality there was also a concern with the implications of inequality on the operation of the state. In his essay “Of Commerce,” David Hume argues that an equality of incomes is not only preferable as a result of the maximization of happiness but also of primary interest from the larger viewpoint of the political community itself.

For Hume, there was also the element of power and interest. Economic inequality did not simply diminish benefits for the entirety of the political community through decreasing the incentive to pay as wealth accrued in smaller and smaller shares of the population; he also saw that there was a general interest in the rich to oppress the poor by laying an increasing burden on them—by which he meant tax burdens—and the protection of their own wealth and power. “Where the riches are in few hands, these must enjoy all the power, and will readily conspire to lay the whole burthen on the poor, and oppress them still farther, to the discouragement of all industry.”⁵⁹

What is interesting in the views of Smith and Hume is the way that they see the realities of economic inequality as inherently political in nature. They seem to have presaged—based on their readings of history—that economic inequalities were inevitable and that there were certain ways that the state could deal with them. But even more, there is the interesting fact that both Smith and Hume knew of the benefits of industry and modern economic thinking. They make a point of showing that even within the new economic system, the old problems of inequality and their effects would retain their power. Their understanding was far more realistic than many have assumed, and it is only with the rise of an ideology that would legitimize these same inequalities that a politics of inequality would begin.

In France, during the later phase of what some have called the radical Enlightenment, figures such as Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Baron d’Holbach, among many others, argued explicitly against the concentration of wealth and property on the basis of the political inequality that was its consequence. Others, such as the Italian Count Alberto Radicati or the German plebians Matthias Knutzen and Johann Christian Edelmann argued for the erasure of social hierarchies and inequalities of all kinds through a massive redistribution of property.⁶⁰ What they railed against was the way that an outdated aristocracy was suppressing the emerging rights of individuals to live and work as equals.

Economic inequality and the quality of citizens’ lives became important topics before the French Revolution since they were seen as contributing fundamentally to social hierarchy and oppression.⁶¹ This was the radical strain of the Enlightenment, and its connection and focus on the problem of economic inequality will become important when discussing the way in which this same discourse develops in American political and social thought. But it should be remarked here that this is a deviation from the tradition of moderation, a turn toward the radical abolition, or leveling, of all forms of hierarchy. And this is important because the view was emerging that economic inequalities were reproducing hierarchies of social power that were the heritage of the feudal past. This was a salient theme in the early years of the American republic, but the concern with economic inequality continued through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a dialogue about the problem of political divisions and social fragmentation.

Rousseau was also concerned with the problem of how economics must relate to political life. In his Discours sur l’économie politique he saw that if economics was not constrained by political principles—namely the power of the “general will” (volonté générale), or public good, over the interests of particular individuals (volonté particulière)—than only injustice or the dissolution of society would result. The function of a “public economy” (l’economie publique) was to reflect in economic terms the political principles of a true republicanism: both were to exist for the purposes of the mutual needs of individuals (par leurs besoins mutuels) and promote and maintain a sense of reciprocity (sensibilité réciproque).⁶² Rousseau was able to mirror his concerns for political wholeness and totality in economic terms, further arguing against economic fragmentation and the way that economic inequality would lead to the erosion of the totality by placing the interests of particular individuals and groups over those of the whole. The Greek themes return once again to invigorate a discourse against economic inequality.⁶³ Rousseau’s radicalism was therefore inspired by his hope for a return of classical republican themes, and it was driven most of all to combat what he saw as the central problem of modernity: the sanctioning of human servitude through law and habits of mind (moeurs). Rousseau’s concern was for the elimination of amour-propre—the vanity and self-directedness of modern life that turned people away from their communal essence, destroying not only civic life in general but the humanity of the individual in the process. Wealth creates distance between the wealthy and poor; it dehumanizes both the rich and the rest of the community.

As the nineteenth century progressed, it was quickly becoming apparent that the primary problem with modernity was how to preserve some kind of social integration in the midst of a market-based society. The concern with the state and its relation to the economy became paramount along with the problems that inequality and property posed to very idea of modern politics. This is first seen in Hegel’s account of the relation between the state and the economy in his political philosophy and his account of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) and civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft). Although Hegel’s remarks on inequality are generally seen as a criticism of the doctrine of any kind of equality of property, he did, in fact, see the emergence of complex modern civil society, with its different social classes (Stände), as having adverse effects on the political community. Hegel is very specific about the notion of “natural inequality,” something that Aristotle himself—and other ancient thinkers as well—saw as the foundation of all inequalities. But Hegel’s argument against equality of property ought to be seen as an argument against the utopian aspirations toward absolute equality, which he dismissed because of their impracticality. In this sense, he argues for a distinction between political and ethical equality, which is absolute, on the one hand, but not in terms of the equal possession of property: “Men are equal, it is true, but only as persons, that is, only with reference to the source of possession.”⁶⁴ Which means that “the assertion that the property of every man ought in justice to be equal to that of every other is false, since justice demands merely that everyone should have property. Indeed, among persons variously endowed, inequality must occur, and equality would be wrong.”⁶⁵

Although some commentators have taken this to be Hegel’s final point on the problem of inequality,⁶⁶ his discussion ought to be seen in light of the classical discourse on inequality, which was critical of communitarian schemes and notions of absolute equality of property. Hegel fits into the egalitarian tradition in his insistence that the entire political community (das Allgemeine) has the responsibility to prevent excesses of poverty and wealth since this can only cause the growth of social dissension and social fragmentation. Hegel’s argument against inequality is—like that of Aristotle and the later Plato in the Laws—the fear of the disintegration of the political community: the increase of the poor and those disenfranchised by the new, economic system of modernity, which is replacing the older, traditional forms of agriculture and small-scale production, creates a mass of people, or rabble (Pöbel), whose interests are the destabilization of society because of their disenfranchisement. Thus, the complex nature of modernity and of an emerging capitalism need to be attenuated by society and the institutions of the state because injustice, and even the threat of revolution itself, is inevitable:

What Hegel sees is the problem of social integration in modern society among various social classes.⁶⁸ Inequality is unjust once it becomes a systemic social problem linked less to the moral claims of individuals against one another than to the claims among entire social classes: “whole classes, whole branches of industry can succumb to poverty when the means this sector of the population produces are no longer sold and their business stagnates. The conjunction of the different factors involved goes beyond what the individual can grasp, and here the state must provide.”⁶⁹ It is the responsibility of society as a whole—and the institutions of the state—to remedy these “contingencies” since it is not possible for individuals to remedy them on their own.⁷⁰ A moderate form of economic equity is therefore necessary to enable modern society to be integrated and to have even some trace of the Greek concept of harmony and wholeness, something Hegel specifically wanted to preserve while merging it with the modern conception of autonomous subjectivity.

The rise of the liberal state therefore does complicate the tradition of the discourse on inequality in Western political thought. For Hegel it was a problem of social atomism caused by the maturation of market institutions. Only the state—the true expression of absolute freedom—was able to quell the divisions that liberal atomism had created in the sphere of civil society. Inequality would be rampant once the economic and political spheres were separate; this would become a major theme in Progressive and New Deal thought: the insight that politics had to be placed at the forefront of economic concerns. The movement against laissez-faire individualism would become an important theme in early-twentieth-century political thought in America, and its Hegelian flavor needs to be recognized. What Hegel brought forth was the rekindling of the classical themes of Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates: an emphasis on the importance of the ideal of political community and social cohesion and the dangers to public life and political institutions that economic inequality posed to the public good.⁷¹

As the industrial age matured and the nineteenth century wore on, the concern with economic inequality grew in intensity. Indeed, although the insight that political and economic power were inherently related did not diminish as the egalitarian discourse progressed through the nineteenth century, English political and social thinkers began to examine the relationship between “civilization” and economic equality. Matthew Arnold is one of the most lucid thinkers on the privileging the relationship among material inequality, culture, and civilization over the problem of political inequality. For Arnold, the late nineteenth century saw the emergence of what he termed the “religion of inequality.” This was largely attributable to the rise of Social Darwinism, which justified economic inequalities between classes as the natural outcomes of social struggle and the Spencerian notion of “survival of the fittest.” This was an ideological counterpart to the transition to massive industrial production and urbanization in England and America. But for Arnold, the central problem of economic inequality was the relationship between civilization and the material forms of life that enabled men to acquire it. Central to Arnold’s analysis was the way that economic inequality robbed individuals of the capacity to acquire not only the preconditions for their material well-being but also a capacity for education, culture, and humanization itself. His concern was with l’esprit de société, which he saw as equivalent to a society of equality between economic classes.

Arnold’s argument is not unlike that of Marx who, about thirty years earlier, had discussed in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts the deformity of civilization produced by the inequities of capitalism: “labor produces for the rich wonderful things—but for the worker it produces privation…. It replaces labor by machines—but some of the workers it throws back to a barbarous type of labor, and the other workers it turns into machines. It produces intelligence—but for the worker, idiocy, cretinism.”⁷³ The insight shared by Marx and Arnold was that economic inequality is not simply an issue of political power; it also infects the very character of culture as well. Arnold’s problem with inequality was not simply that it distorted political arrangements; rather, it was that the effects of inequality were reducing civilization to barbarism. It pitted owners against laborers, the rich against the poor, and in the process reduced culture to a war of economic interests. The brutalization of culture, or civilization was at hand, and economic inequality would be the cause, in his view, of the downfall of the culture and the rise of anarchy. Indeed, for Arnold as well, economic inequalities were increasingly becoming a problem that was expanding beyond the boundaries of social justice; it was a matter of culture as well, having permanent effects on the development of civilization and humanity itself:

This concern with the preconditions for individual livelihood—both in economic and cultural terms—was also central to the thought of John Stuart Mill, who saw that the realities of economic inequality also had a serious effect on political and public life. Unlike Arnold, Mill was deeply familiar with the technicalities of economics, having penned his Principles of Political Economy in 1848. But for Mill, as for Arnold, economic inequality posed a problem of morality and culture because it made whole swaths of the population—namely the working class—dependent on another, wealthier class. For Mill, this dependency was nothing less than neofeudal. Even more, Mill argues that property rights and the specific forms of income distribution within any society can and must be interfered with by the political community in order to enhance the cultural and moral life of citizens. Skepticism of the power of the market and its interests to provide for the fully developed well-being of citizens was a primary theme in Mill’s writings, and the problem of inequality as destructive of a cohesive, cooperative moral political community was as well. As Nadia Urbinati has insightfully argued:

Mill’s arguments against social inequality were therefore grounded not in a discourse of strict egalitarianism but in the preeminence of politics over economics, an emphasis on the erosion of a robust democratic public sphere. Drawing inspiration from the idea of the Greek polis of antiquity, Mill rightly saw that inequality endangered the possibility of a free political life defined along the lines of free human development and a public sphere characterized by conditions of harmonious social interaction. Mill further saw that economic society would emerge at the expense of political society and that the interests of the market would inevitably devalue politics as a consequence of this shift. Economic divisions could not be justified by some natural right to property because property rights are, in the end, social rights and therefore not natural. What was natural, Mill argued in the manner of the ancient Greek thinkers, was political society, and whereas markets were an aspect of social progress and the satisfaction of social needs, they were also a sphere of activity that threatened political cohesion on cultural grounds as well as through their effects, especially class divisions and social fragmentation. In many ways, the concerns of Arnold and Mill represent the last gasp of the spirit of the ancients and their vision of a cohesive political life characterized by social solidarity, virtue, liberty, and equality in the face of the atomizing effects of the capitalist market system and its deep class divisions. This was also the concern of their contemporaries such as Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim, who saw modernity—a crucial aspect of which they diagnosed as the divisive impact of modern economic life on the community as a whole—fragmenting social bonds and eroding political life.⁷⁶

These themes run straight into the twentieth century. R. H. Tawney argues, after Arnold, that the “religion of inequality” has become resurgent and that it dominates modern views of economy and society. Dewey argues that the concerns of the public need to be privileged over those of the individuals or smaller segments of society and that inequality is one of the great threats to society and any kind of thriving democratic community. The erosion of this discourse—which has been clear for the past several decades as the ideology of neoliberalism has increasingly gained ascendancy—has once again meant a return to a religion of inequality, toward a justification of inequality as a means toward social progress and even ideas of liberty and freedom as well.