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

At the core of the early republic was a concept of equality that seeped through the boundaries of politics and economics. Early American thinkers inherited both liberal and republican ideas, but both traditions were tied to the idea of property. Liberal thought emphasized the nature of work and the idea that the natural right to property was inherent in the capacity to labor. The very notion of property, in Locke’s famous words, was anything with which one mixed one’s labor. Republican ideas were also premised on property, but on the notion that an equal dispersion of property needed to be maintained by some political means to ensure that political power was also evenly dispersed. The republican impulse saw that the institutions of the state had to protect against the formation of blocs of power derived from property in order to prevent the reemergence of feudal relations of mastery and subservience. Republicanism, in this sense, was not simply an “ideology”: it was a political theory which sought to prevent the growth of actual inequalities of power within society, and many radical republican thinkers saw inequalities of property as the source of inequalities of power. The concept of liberty that these thinkers employed was defined by both of these ideological traditions simultaneously: on the one hand, it was generally assumed that the labor theory of property would result in a tolerable distribution of property; at the same time, the social bonds of society would need to be cleansed of master-servant relations and the inequalities of social power that characterized the older forms of feudal social relations. Inequalities of property were seen as the result of corrupt political institutions that would grant economic, political, and social privilege based not on merit but on rank and status; each individual’s ability to labor, to work and manipulate nature and acquire property meant that each person had an equal ability to obtain property and self-sufficiency.

Both of these impulses—the first, an economic ethic that preached a natural move toward equality, and the second, a political project that would remake social and political institutions for the purpose of eliminating hierarchical forms of domination—are crucial for understanding how the idea of economic inequality was perceived by early American thinkers.² The first doctrine—derived from Lockean roots—was radical in a political context where social inequality was fused to political inequalities and status distinctions. But the two found affinity with each other. Jeffersonian republicans argued that an agrarian economy would produce the ideal synthesis of liberalism and classical civic republicanism: the individual farmer who earned what he produced and participated in public life not out of self-interest but out of a civic republican impulse. But in either case, the complexity of the American discourse on economic inequality comes from the fact that over time, the liberal and republican ideas that defined it in the beginning would cleave from one another as the economic context changed. The liberal republic that was envisioned in the eighteenth century would slowly give way, as capitalism began to emerge, to liberal capitalism. The shift is not simply a historical reality; it also gives us insight into the ideational framework of the present because it is the ways that ideas and the material context of society come together that explain how economic inequality and economic life more generally are conceived in the American mind.

Both republican and liberal ideas railed against power and undue privilege. They both saw property as a source for power, and, roughly speaking, both sets of ideas saw that equality was the backbone of any just political order. But within each of them resided a tendency for conflict. A republic would be established that would, it was hoped, limit the ability of the few to take power over the many, but this was not anathema to markets and commerce. True, Jefferson and other classically minded republican thinkers saw commerce as destructive to any sentiment of civic virtue, but in the end, the idea of personal industry and individual self-reliance was consonant with republican ideas of the public good and the absence of domination. Economic inequality was debated, but it was generally seen that a natural economy characterized by industriousness and equality of opportunity would produce rough equality of condition. The feudal arrangements of the past would be kept at bay as long as property was not allowed to be accumulated in extremes.

Despite this, the reality of economic inequality in the pre-revolutionary years was stark. In urban areas such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, inequality was more prevalent than in rural areas. Predominantly an agricultural economy, inequalities of the more modern variety were seen as the result of the emergence of a society based on commerce and modern forms of manufacture. In time, this would lead to a tension with the liberal economic ethos and its labor theory of value and property. But during the earliest years of the nation, the problem of economic inequality was seen as a propensity of a commercial republic, a problem that would only worsen as commercial institutions deepened their influence. Some thinkers, notably Alexander Hamilton, would come to embrace inequality not only as a necessity but as a public good. Others were concerned about the fate of the republic once wealth began to concentrate, knowing the economic course that Europe had taken, and they were aware that a similar fate could plague America as well. The return to aristocracy was a paramount concern, and economic inequality was known to be its root. The concern with economic divisions was therefore inherently political.

It is true that, from a transatlantic point of view, America was seen as egalitarian and unmarked by the social divisions familiar to Europeans. Tocqueville’s comment that “in a democratic society like that of the United States … fortunes are scanty,” was not so much empirical reality as it was a relative truth contrasting Europe and America. Indeed, Tocqueville himself also saw the problem that an aristocracy of manufacturers would pose for the future of American democracy; the real question was whether or not the ethos of egalitarianism would be able to sustain itself. But more important for Tocqueville was the fact that there existed an “equality of conditions” that “gives some resources to all the members of the community” and “also prevents any of them from having resources of great extent.”³ The “egalitarian thesis” about early America argued for this kind of equality of condition—it was seen that America’s scant population and vast endowments of land would be able to overcome the abysmal fate of Europe, whose land had been gobbled up by an aristocratic elite while masses of the poor were landless.

The republican nature of American democracy was premised on the ability to regulate the inequalities that a market-based economy would create, but mainly with respect to landed property. There was no way to prevent inequalities from emerging, but there were ways of preventing excess. Here many thinkers differed, some pessimistic, some the opposite; but all knew that once economic divisions became apparent and once they were allowed to deepen, the probability for tyranny, or the subordination of the many by the power of the few, would become more likely and the very fate of republican government would be at stake. Thinkers like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others therefore advocated for the government to regulate economic inequality through taxation and the elimination of debts, as well as the regulation through law of property distribution and inheritance. They saw that economic inequality was a threat to any kind of government based on popular sovereignty, and they saw—just as the thinkers had throughout the Western political tradition on the topic had also seen—that it could only lead to a disintegration of political freedom and to social fragmentation.

The notion that the American political tradition is in some way uniform, monolithic, and defined by a historical “exceptionalism” simply misses the larger political context.⁴ The wider literature on early American political culture unearthed this long ago, while also beginning a huge debate between liberalism and civic republicanism. The radical concerns of the antiaristocratic impulse, which has its roots in the English commonwealth tradition and was translated into American political consciousness, informed the critique of inequality. But the political concerns that attached to this theme need to be highlighted. As a political doctrine, Lockean liberalism—with its emphasis on the labor theory of property and the importance of a society based on contract rather than status—was fundamental to the American political project since it eliminated encrusted forms of social and political inequality by emphasizing the universal character of individual labor as the only true source of wealth and property. Much ink has been spilled on the debate about whether liberalism or republicanism were central in the making of the political ideology of early America, but the debate between the primacy of either is largely misguided.⁵ Themes from both traditions were salient, and it is more correct to characterize early American political thought as a fusion of the two traditions rather than emphasizing the predominance of one over the other.⁶

Both republican and liberal streams of political thought saw property as a central concern, but each conceptualized it differently. Liberals saw property as the result of individual labor and industry, and republicanism was to be the framework within which a new society and polity would be formed, one characterized by the elimination of “dependencies and subordinations that still lurked everywhere in their lives.”⁷ This would take the form of an equality of property, though not a mandated absolute equality. The liberal assumption was that once people were free to live and work as they pleased, a rough equality of condition would result. The republican insight, as I showed in the previous chapter, was tied to the idea of an equal distribution of property. Thinkers such as Harrington, in his Commonwealth of Oceana, and Walter Moyle, in his Essay on the Roman Government, saw property and power as united. Liberals, too, were aware of this, and they sought—as did the English radicals before them—to eradicate forms of privilege inherent in feudal society. For liberals, once there was equality of opportunity—equal access for all to work, produce, trade, buy and sell—then the hierarchies of the past would melt away. The political messages of both streams of thought were the same in the sense that they sought to overturn an order where social power was held by only some and relations of domination still held sway.

Liberal republicanism held that equality would predominate as long as the labor theory of property was allowed to operate unhindered. Ideas about the economy and economic life were therefore built on the foundations of a moral economy of individual labor, and this was something distinctly Lockean in nature. Lockean liberalism also justified the acquisition of property, but this, too, was seen in a broader moral and political context based on the modern understanding of equality: the only true source of wealth and property was labor—this would serve as the basis for egalitarian slogans during the Jacksonian era—and labor was a universal human possession. The emphasis on individualism and property has been used as a stick to beat the political and egalitarian implications of Lockean-inspired ideas and the kind of liberalism that it established.⁸ Lockean natural right has been seen by some critics as little more than a superstructural cover for an emerging bourgeois class or as an argument for atheistic hedonism. This does not capture how eighteenth-century Americans interpreted Lockean natural right, however; they saw its egalitarian implications in the face of oppressive and feudal institutions and highlighted its “natural” mode of distributing property and wealth equally and with fairness. They also saw that in terms of equality, any distinction made between economic and political spheres was essentially meaningless. True, equality in terms of property and wealth would not be absolute, but it would be rough enough so that political power would not aggregate into the hands of the few, who would dominate the many. The key was therefore opposition to the emergence of any kind of hierarchical social formations, and both liberal and republican ideas were seen as capable of reaching this end. America therefore provided a thoroughly new context within which a new form of political and economic life could flourish, and the liberal economic ethic was a central part of this.

But we cannot be content with leaving the analysis here. It is not ideas alone that can explain political history, but rather the ways that ideas and material conditions interact. As capitalism matured, industrialism began to surge, and wage labor displaced guild and farm labor, the republican themes begin to erode; liberal ideas become flattened into an equality of opportunity and an ethic of competition. Stripped of their political nuances, these ideas, which had been unified in the eighteenth century, split. We see this first, I think, with the radicals of the Jacksonian period, but from that point on, the republican themes wane. As Isaac Kramnick has observed, “Bourgeois radicalism directed its emancipatory message to the aristocracy, its authoritarian one to the poor,”⁹ and it is this dual nature of liberalism that is central to understanding the way that the historical idea of economic inequality progresses through American political thought and political history.

Viewed historically, the concern with republicanism needs to be seen in light of the impulse to wed this liberal ethic with the secular, early-American institutional concern for public ends. Although some writers have argued that early allusions to republicanism in America were not substantive but rather metaphorical in nature, this misses the larger concern that these thinkers had for the problem of social and political power.¹⁰ The concern with a secular political regime that would balance the unequal powers inherent in society in order to provide for a broader sense of public welfare was derived from the English commonwealth tradition, which itself was, in fact, heavily influenced by the ideas of Greek and Roman political thought. American political thinkers had no intention of replicating the Greek polis; the central concerns were eliminating the hierarchical power relationships that were rooted in the institutions of Europe and creating a society of equals. A political state based on contract and secular institutions; an economy grounded in individual labor and effort; individual political conscience rooted in civic mindedness; and a public spirit and public institutions characterized by equality and the absence of domination and inequalities of social and political power were the broad political goals that pulsed throughout the political and social thought of radicals of the time. It is therefore not a distinction between liberalism and republicanism for which we should look, but the affinities and the fusion between the two that are actually so important.

This is crucial for understanding the approach to economic inequality not only during the first few decades after the founding of the republic but for the decades that preceded the Civil War, as well. It is even more important to see that the real essence of the American approach to the problem of economic inequality would develop out of the political understanding that this fusion of liberalism and republicanism fostered. Political history is not explicable simply through the transmission of “ideas” and political “languages”; it can be comprehended only as a result of a confrontation with the political and economic realities of power relations, which are resolvable only through the ways that the participants could make sense of them. Certain political ideas therefore can unmask the power relations of any given moment or legitimate them; but in either case, the interpretation of political ideas through time must take into account the arrangements of concrete power relations of the time in question because it is those that the ideas are reacting to or supporting. This is the importance of political tradition and political ideas: they help political actors make sense of the political constraints they face, and central to the various political constraints are economic constraints: the limitations to mobility, to the access of property, to the ways that lives are lived—all are shaped by the nature of economic life that surrounds them. The point is not that political interests are mechanically connected to economic interests; rather, it is that economic relations shape other social and political relations and that these give rise to competing interests. The various ways that individuals relate to one another, to themselves, and to how they view their interests are deeply shaped by the economic context within which they live and work, and this was true for people in the early American republic. In particular, many thinkers saw property as the source of social and political power, and its distribution was a crucial issue for the early republic through the antebellum period, as both liberal and republican ideas stressed property as a central element in achieving political liberty.

The antifeudal impulse that was a key feature of the new political theory emerging in the early republic emphasized the need for equality and freedom simply in both ideological and concrete terms: freedom could only emerge within a society of real equals since the absence of equality was assumed to indicate the existence of unequal relations of power and, hence, the existence of domination, constraint, or some other form of nonfreedom. And this is something particularly important for understanding the way that many early American critics of inequality viewed the relationship between economics and politics—unequal property produced an unequal polity and power and economic life were deeply braided with one another. It is not as a hidden bourgeois ideology of economic interests that we should interpret early American political thought, but as an optimism about the ability of the commercial system to buttress the political ideals of liberty these early critics thought accompanied it. Nor is it the case that republicanism was an ideology that can be interpreted outside of the economic concerns of the time.¹¹ Liberal republicanism was an ideology supported by the economic context of its time: small-scale economic production, agrarianism, and guilds of skilled craftsmen. Economic life was small scale, confined to local sites and still largely provincial. This meant that the Lockean liberal economic ethic was easily compatible with early American economic life and institutions, and it was decidedly against the forms of economic life of the past, where rank and privilege were supported by the unequal holding of property. Only when capitalism deepened its development, the scale of the market began moving toward the national level, and small-scale production and agriculture were being swamped by industrial behemoths would this situation change and the meaning of the liberal economic ethic change with it.

But economic inequality has to be seen in the light of the disastrous implications it would have for eighteenth-century Americans on the dual ideals of the economic autonomy of the individual and the project of wiping out forms of servitude and domination—irrespective of either their Lockean liberal or republican roots. These ideals were viewed as essentially a single economic and political project. What early American political thinkers saw as distinctive about American society was the result of a synthesis of economics and politics—liberty was grounded in certain political principles and required certain economic conditions. Indeed, the ethos of political liberty in America always had a material base. Grounded squarely in the tradition of natural law as it was used in the English liberal tradition (i.e., in Hobbes and Locke), the idea of individual liberty was deeply affected by its historical relationship to European feudalism.¹² The emphasis on the idea of private ownership of property was meant to protect from the arbitrary use of power unleashed by the aristocracy. Property was a means for self-sufficiency and autonomy; it highlighted the goal of most early Americans in thought and in practice, which was to attain a “modest economic independence based on honest individual labor over the extremes of capitalist wealth or desperate pauperism.”¹³ The American economic ethic as it developed in the eighteenth century was therefore concerned primarily with independence from forms of dependent labor and with the moral-political end of small property ownership, and it forged a more abstract ethic over time, which would regulate the way that institutions that created inequality would be judged: the idea that one ought to keep what one produces. As the economic context changed more than 150 years later, this ethic would take on very different meanings indeed. Rather than serving as a radical call against quasi-feudal institutions and for equality, it would be turned on its head to justify some of the greatest disparities of wealth and power in the nation’s history.

Some thinkers, such as Jefferson, were suspicious of the moral dimensions of the market. His famous argument that “venality suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition,” was an example of the way that the lines between economics and politics still held sway. Jefferson was not against commerce by any means, but he, and others, too, saw that the excesses of the market could lead to corruption. Although not all republicans shared the same skepticism of the market, they mostly agreed that political life ought not be subservient to economic life. Markets may be mechanisms for the free exchange of individuals, but they were also based on narrow self-interest, as opposed to political life and its emphasis on the preservation of commonwealth. The complexities of a commercial society were crucial to many of the early American political thinkers, and the key was to preserve what they saw as a sense of social cohesion in the face of accumulation, individualism, and hedonism. For these early thinkers, venality, luxury, and the fruits of the commercial centers in Europe were for centuries the root of political corruption and of political and social inequality. Rapid market expansion, therefore, would be subversive to the moral virtue of the citizenry; republican ideas of democracy could only survive in a place where a balance between politics and the economy could be maintained.¹⁴ Once the economy was allowed to slip from its moral moorings, the result, many thought, would be nothing less than the erosion of the American political project itself.

It is important to emphasize historical and economic context. For the Americans of the eighteenth century, the institution of the market and the emerging market economy as a whole were widely seen as being characterized by the absence of privilege and hierarchy. Thus, the original ideology of laissez-faire should be seen in its proper historical, sociological, and philosophical contexts: as a reliance on individual initiative as opposed to authoritarian direction and on the production of wealth for the larger prosperity of society and not for the maintenance of status and the hierarchical relations of the “old world.”¹⁵ It was a conception of the market that was yet to be touched by the complexities of large-scale capitalism. And it is for this reason that the history of the political idea of economic inequality requires us to pay attention to the material or economic context of the time. It is not that the material context causes a reflex change in the ideas about inequality and equality; it is that certain assumptions that are made in one period no longer hold in the next—new ways of thinking about the relationship between political ideas and economic institutions and realities are therefore constantly required.

Much of the standard literature on economic and political life in pre-revolutionary America emphasizes political radicalism stemming from political agitation against monarchy and pre-liberal social relationships, that is, those relations that were characterized by inequality of power and by mastery and servitude.¹⁶ But it is also important to highlight the role that economic inequality—most prevalent in the major commercial cities—had on the idea of equality that was embraced by revolutionary thinkers. These thinkers saw that the relations of the feudal past were the result of inequalities of property; the central issue of the republican enterprise was seen as resting on some degree of equality of property.¹⁷

The empirical realities of economic inequality were evident well before the revolution. From about 1720 through 1780, economic development in urban centers—spurred on by the evolution of merchant classes and clustered urban markets—marked the beginning of serious disparities in wealth and income.¹⁸ Those at the lower ranks were propertyless, while wealthy merchants were beginning to accumulate larger shares of property and wealth.¹⁹ But at the macroeconomic level, it is important to note that the economic inequality was generally low in the colonial period and that serious wealth and income inequalities did not begin to occur until the decades preceding the Civil War.²⁰ Indeed, urban inequalities were not so significant since the economy was not based in urban areas but in rural areas and small towns. What early American political thinkers and political economists saw was that inequality was on the horizon, that as commercial society became more complex, the distribution of property would become more and more unequal. In addition, as market relationships grew more sophisticated, there were also movements against market pricing, especially of foodstuffs, culminating in more than thirty food riots between 1776 and 1779.²¹ Coming to terms with this economic reality would be one of the core problems that a democratic republic would need to face, and the social theories of early American political thinkers would take up the issue in earnest.

In addition to the evidence from quantitative historical studies, the effects of economic inequalities and their severity are made clear in many of the newspapers and political pamphlets of the day.²² In 1750, a Boston pamphleteer using the pseudonym Vincent Centinel published Massachusetts in Agony; or, Important Hints to the Inhabitants of the Province: Calling Aloud for Justice to Be Done to the Oppressed. He made his disgust known for the emerging merchant class that was enlarging its share of wealth as a result of the rapid marketization of the city when he wrote that “poverty and discontent appear in every Face (except the Countenances of the Rich).” The New York Gazette asked whether it was equitable “that 99, rather 999, should suffer for the Extravagance or Grandeur of one? Especially when it is considered that Men frequently owe their Wealth to the impoverishment of their neighbors.”²³ The writer continues by saying “it is to the meaner Class of Mankind, the industrious Poor, that so many of us are indebted for those goodly Dwellings we inhabit, for that comfortable substance we enjoy, while others are languishing under the disagreeable Sensations of Penury and Want.”²⁴ Such diatribes were in no short abundance in the middle to late eighteenth century, and they are a testament to the prominence that economic inequality had in the minds of pre-revolutionary American colonists. This was certainly a concern that did not dwindle after the revolution was over.

The formation of a radical consciousness that militated against economic inequality and the realities that the maturing commercial centers were producing was therefore clearly not only political in nature. Economic conditions in urban areas, however, did not characterize the American economy as a whole. The reliance on economic liberalism—even within the confines of broader republican themes and attitudes—is most distinctive when it comes to seeing what was most important in American political economy. Since Lockean liberalism and much of the dominant English and Scottish political economy and social theory of the eighteenth century were based on the labor theory of value and its ability to ground political liberty, the economic ethic of Americans was largely liberal in nature. Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, may have believed in the inevitable truth of a laissez-faire approach to the economy. For various reasons, the people who lived through such institutional changes rightfully did not share in this optimism.

The American economy in the years after the revolution was seen by most observers of the time as resulting in a strong egalitarianism of economic and social condition. Before the revolution and the founding of the republic, there had been a tradition of hierarchy that had militated against any form of equality.²⁵ The discourse of “levelling” in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was branded as utopian and seen as fanatical. Equality in economic terms, in terms of property, was a clear threat to a social order based on rank and privilege. Conservatives could always stress that leveling meant the fragmentation of social life, the elimination of the moral and structural center that gave security and peace to the small communities of the New England colonies.²⁶ The specter of leveling would continue to have deep resonance in American politics through to the present. But the irony was that the conservatives of the time were in fact not fearful of regulation or the control of markets and private property. They were fearful of market society and liberalism itself because these would lead to the erosion of encrusted forms of power and elite status. With the emergence of the market, older forms of economic privilege would be broken and the hierarchies of old would be threatened. But this older argument against leveling would continue to plague those who argued for any form of economic equality. In spite of this, early American political thinkers after the revolution were more realistic, and they were certain of at least one thing, among their many disagreements: economic inequality would be a decisive threat to the democratic republican experiment that they were seeking to inaugurate.

The predominant view of political economy of the time saw a kind of natural liberty and natural equality arising from an economy that did away with the older forms of mercantilist policies and their monopolistic consequences. What Smith termed “natural liberty” was to be unleashed by the opening up of economic freedom and private property. From this economic equality would arise since the elimination of older forms of land holding and the even playing field that markets created would allow the overcoming of the stubborn inequalities of the past, which were rooted in feudal social arrangements of land and orders. James Steuart’s idea of a participatory economy argued that when all individuals and classes participated in the national economy it would allow for a social harmony unknown in a past marked by privilege and hierarchy.²⁷

In purely political terms, early American thinkers were split between the kind of “naturalistic” discourse of the Scottish political economists and the political realities that they actually faced. Essential was the question of political power and stability: how could a commercial society and the inequalities that followed from it be prevented from destroying the democratic republican experiment? Thinkers like John Adams and James Madison saw this as the primary issue, and they sought to remedy the problem through political architecture. The key was to arrange institutions so that inequity of power could be minimized. Although they were convinced of the egalitarian nature of Americans as opposed to Europeans, they wanted economic progress and development. Knowing this would lead to class antagonisms, they wanted to avert political crisis before it actually began.

Madison’s claims that “differing interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens”²⁸ and that “the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property”²⁹ admitted not only that classes exist but that their diverse economic interests would lead to a splintering of the political community. What was at issue for Madison was the conflict between factional interest and what he vaguely terms the “public good.” The crux of Madison’s argument was preventing the emergence of a social order that was in any way based upon the privilege or the interests of a single class. Madison feared the same thing as many other early political thinkers in post-revolutionary America: the dissolution of democratic government and the reemergence of a social order based on inequalities of economic power. This kind of economic power was only possible once economic interest was entwined with political institutions. Political modernity was to be marked not by utopian illusions of leveling or absolute equality but by the absence of extreme inequalities of power—a state that could only be achieved by a government legally grounded in popular sovereignty with the appropriate checks on excesses of power. Madison rightly saw the source of these disparities: inequalities of property and differing economic interests. But his mistake was to think that these could be resolved within an impartial framework guided by the institutional constraints of the Constitution, one that would not obey the interests of faction but rather the principles of the public good.

John Adams was less optimistic about the prospects of economic equality in America. His central premise was, like the other writers of the Federalist, to protect republican government from the social divisions that were sure to arise with a developing economy. Without illusions, Adams approached the problem of inequality in straight political terms. It was clear that inequality would be a consistent dilemma facing a commercial society; the key was to embed the very structure of government with protections against these divisions. It was not an affection for the poor and the propertyless that drove Adams’s argument—he was fearful of the ideology of leveling and denounced those that followed Shay’s Rebellion as “lawless, tyrannical rabble”—it was the protection of society itself from the social and political convulsions that inequality would surely create that concerned him. His fear of the impact of economic inequality on society is expressed in his Defense of Constitutions of Government of the United States:

The fear of the poor was matched by the fear of an emerging aristocracy. Adams recognized that an economic aristocracy could emerge from even the humble classes that made up the small-scale economy in early America, dominated as it was by merchants and small manufacturers. He saw that inequality would increase in the United States as long as a too rapid course was followed toward modern industry and the production of national wealth; the result would be social divisions, political strife, and, most important for Adams, the corruption of republican virtue.³¹ The poor sought economic relief through redistribution, which was therefore opposed to the interests of the propertied and the wealthy, who, through their desire to consolidate their positions of privilege, would push toward aristocracy. This has an Aristotelian ring to it, and for good reason. Stability—or what Aristotle knew as the “secure constitution”—was premised on the absence of great disparities between rich and poor. There could be no justification for inequality since it would, by historical necessity, cleave society into parts and fragment the public.

In any case, republican virtue could not be maintained in the face of the expanding market, and, without the moral and political cohesion that such virtue provided, the only pragmatic course was to strengthen political institutions. Political authority invested in firm institutions—although legally grounded—would be the only way to counteract the effects of economic division and its fruits. Unlike Madison who thought the problems created by unequal distributions of property could be solved through electoral politics, Adams saw that there would be two great opposing interests, the wealthy and the propertyless, and that this division would only grow over time as economic development intensified. And Adams was keen on measuring this distribution of wealth, making the effort to look at statistics and estimate income and wealth distribution. His political ideas rested not on abstraction but on the actual empirical trends he was perceiving. Things did not bode well for the future.

Adams’s political philosophy was simple enough. Since all men by their nature seek power, economic inequality needed to be kept in check, for it would result in political tyranny or domination by one class in one form or another. The bicameral system could therefore provide a check on these opposing interests and defend the republic. But the real problem was clear: economic inequality and the divisions it produced were permanent features of a commercial society, and the idea of reclaiming the moral ideal of a political community founded on republican virtue was nothing more than illusory. Ideally, property should be widespread to prevent the emergence of an aristocracy, but the complexity of the market system presented thinkers like Adams—and others who agreed broadly with the same idea—with the difficult reality of controlling the effects of inequality rather than eliminating the problem itself or the mechanisms that caused it.

The fear of a return to aristocracy in the early republic was widespread, and it was commonly thought that this would result from an increase in economic inequality. Inequality arising from economic divisions was a threat to the democratic experiment, and Adams feared that it would produce the very things that the American republic was defined against: tyranny, demagoguery, and aristocracy. Adams was hardly alone on this front. The Pennsylvanian George Logan, writing in 1792, commented on the corporate charter that was given to Alexander Hamilton’s Society for Useful Manufactures by asking, “will it not, by fostering an inequality of fortune, provide the destruction of the equality of rights, and tend strongly to aristocracy?”³² James Lyon, the editor of the National Magazine, wrote in 1799, “Any person who pays attention to the subject, will discover that the aristocratic faction, which is growing into influence in the United States, is built by various classes of citizens, as opposite in their interests, as their designs are to honesty, or light to darkness.”³³

Conceptually speaking, the critique of economic inequality was quite different in the early years of the American republic than it would become in later periods in history. The liberal republicanism of these early years saw the connection between politics and economics through the institution of property. It was clear that property itself engendered political and social power, and, as a result, republics needed to ensure that property did not become unequal. “In what then does real power consist?” asked Noah Webster in his defense of the Constitution in 1787. “The answer is short and plain—in property.”³⁴ Webster’s analysis of Roman history via Tacitus sought to prove that freedom could only be obtained if the people were able to hold “the power of governing in their own hands.”³⁵ When the property of the plebeians had been acquired by the nobility of Rome, they were able to consolidate their power in the state. The lessons of Roman history were to be applied to eighteenth-century Europe:

Webster’s analysis sprang from a simple dictum: “property is the basis of power.” This was a variation on his Scottish contemporary John Millar, who put forth the thesis “power follows property.” Millar, a student of Adam Smith and cohort of the great Scottish political economists of his time, saw that political history ought to be interpreted as having a fundamentally economic basis. In his study The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771), Millar showed that the basis of all political and social power and authority rests on the distribution of property. Forms of dependence and servitude emerged only when landed property was held for long periods of time in unequal hands. Then, feudal forms of social and political life would emerge because those without land would be forced to work for those who possessed it. Only the emergence of commerce, he observed, could reduce the older order of rank and distinction since no one would be able to hold on to property long enough to form such relations of power and control:

Jefferson’s views on economic inequality and its political impact also synthesize republican and liberal themes. Although Jefferson’s conception of politics was deeply influenced by classical Greek conceptions of political life and human nature, it was also deeply influenced by the labor theory of property. He saw that the new American republic would be an opportunity to realize that humanism that was fostered by Greek philosophical thought as well as Christian ethics.³⁸ In Jefferson’s political philosophy, economics was therefore subordinate to the sphere of politics. Even more, he saw that economics was a private affair of the household, fostering self-sufficiency and precluding dependence and unfreedom. He inherited this insight from his reading of Aristotle, held that economic activity was a private affair: one manages one’s household to obtain self-sufficiency, which thinkers like Jefferson saw as central to the function of a free society since it stands in direct opposition to forms of dependency.

The core of many of Jefferson’s economic ideas was derived from Aristotle. He saw the economy as both a private and an associational affair, and he saw that only through individual labor could true equality ever arise. Inequality was the product of privilege, and the amassing of fortune from the labor of others was a corruption of what he would have seen as a natural economic state. Although Jefferson’s economic and political ideas are rightly seen as creating what Richard Hofstadter has called America’s “agrarian myth,” his wider ideas on politics and economics require—especially when talking about economic inequality in American political thought—a more nuanced look.³⁹ Indeed, Jefferson’s thought is notoriously antisystematic, and isolating broadly consistent themes and positions is a difficult task. Jefferson’s republicanism, however, is in tension with his economic liberalism, and this makes him an important contributor to the way that the discourse on economic inequality evolved in American political thought and history. Jefferson’s essential view of economic inequality is that it is a fundamental obstacle to democracy and human development and happiness. This is a consistent theme throughout his varied writings, but the way that government is to handle this problem is a very different manner. In his Notes on the State of Virginia he is influenced by the liberal separation between state and society as well as economy and government. When considering the plight of the poor, it is through charity alone that they are to be helped; the state ought to play no role in alleviating such social ills. “So it is of the maintenance of the poor, which being merely a matter of charity, cannot be deemed expended in the administration of government.”⁴⁰ Since it is “the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour,”⁴¹ and this spirit is to be—in Jefferson’s agrarian republic—devoted to working one’s own soil, government aid to the poor will create a dependency that, in its own right, becomes a form of servitude (“dependence begets subservience”).⁴²

Jefferson wrote the Notes in 1781, and his ideas on the problem of economic inequality were naïve at best at this time. By following the intellectual logic of Lockean liberalism, his arguments against the state’s alleviating the plight of the poor was essentially apolitical—it remained an abstraction. It was not until Jefferson’s visit to France and his long sojourn there that he saw the real effects of economic inequity and its concrete moral and social implications. His experience in France showed him the threat that inequities in wealth and property can have on the population as a whole and its political climate, and he began to modify his views on the role of the state in responding to inequality. In a letter to James Madison in 1785, he writes:

But Jefferson did not abandon his belief in a minimal state that would leave men, as he says in his First Inaugural Address, “otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread that it has earned.”⁴⁴ This is not a contradiction. Jefferson’s ideas were in tune with the basic premises of economic thought of the age: namely the liberal economic ethic that saw that an economic system based on liberty was grounded in individual labor. The distribution of wealth and property would therefore be naturally distributed; the fruits of labor would be based on effort and work, not on privilege.

But Jefferson does argue in his letter to Madison that there is a need for the state to mollify economic inequality, and this apparent contradiction is intimately tied to Jefferson’s understanding of political society as a whole. Although based primarily on the notion of political liberty, Jefferson’s idea of freedom was not a narrow liberalism founded on the establishment of private property. It was also thoroughly shaped by the classical republican ideal of political virtue—the idea that self-interest needed to be subordinate to the public good or the interests of political society, of which the individual was inextricably a part. This virtue could only arise from the cohesion of society as a whole, not from a society divided against itself. Even more, property for Jefferson was not simply defined by possession, but by its moral overtones. Indeed, Jefferson’s his letter to Madison reflects not only his evolving conception of the role of the state in mitigating economic inequality but his complex views of property and the moral status that he attached to it.

Jefferson makes a tripartite distinction when it comes to the subject of property.⁴⁵ He defines property by the activity with which it is worked, and each kind of property has a different moral implication for individual and society. Feudal property is defined by subservience and domination. It is based on a refusal of natural rights and leads to despotism and tyranny as well as the moral depletion of its subjects. Commercial property—because of its ability to allow its owners to accumulate wealth—also creates hierarchies and distinctions. It is only agrarian property relations that allow for true independence and the breaking down of social hierarchies. Only through agrarian property relations can individuals cultivate the virtues needed for self-governance and therefore the proper preparation for the pursuit of the common good. Property for Jefferson is not a Lockean natural right; it is not something natural to humans within some kind of prepolitical state of nature. Rather, Jefferson sees property as decisively factitious: it is a social creation and therefore one that can be warped to serve the needs of the few rather than the many.

Combating feudal property arrangements was Jefferson’s first attempt at dealing with inequality politically in order to eliminate it. This was not something that was controversial among most social thinkers in America at the time, since there was a general consensus among influential political thinkers and political economists—both in the United States and abroad—that older forms of property and social order were the main causes of inequality, politically and economically. This was the appeal, after all, of the ethos of liberal economic individualism: the ability to keep what you worked for, to hold as property that for which you have labored. But this economic idea was never meant as a substitute ethics, for Jeffersonians at least, for politics. The public good was still at the core of republican politics; economic inequalities—whatever their causes—were seen as a threat to the kind of agrarian utopia that Jeffersonian republicans sought to erect.

This made sense in the conception of economic progress that drove Hamilton’s model. He saw the encouragement of a commercial- and manufacturing-based society as the only model for economic progress and the development of national wealth and prosperity. Unlike Madison, Adams, and certainly Jefferson, he opposed the expansion and support for the agrarian sector and saw the only path to national economic progress through the development of modern industry. But at the same time, he saw that stratification between the wealthy and the mass of workers was to be a permanent feature of a developed economy. Class conflict would intensify as economic growth continued, but as long as a strong central government was in place, there would be little fear of political conflict. At the same time, inequality would persist in Hamilton’s model since the mercantile and industrial classes would require all the financial help possible from the central government. To manage the swelling national debt that would emerge from such a policy, tax burdens were to be thrown onto workers, especially planters, whom he saw as representing the economic past rather than the future. Taxation on the wealthy was to be essentially nonexistent: taxing capital and profits went against the basic idea of liberty and, more pragmatically, it would hinder investment and stall the course of national economic growth.

Hamilton’s views on inequality are important because they offer the first glimpse into a depoliticized conception of economic activity, growth, and policy. In this sense, especially, he could not be more different from Jefferson (and even Adams) in that he did not subordinate the function of economics to politics. In place of a labor theory of property linked to notions of liberty and anti-aristocratic privilege, Hamilton saw that economic inequality need not be associated with the old world’s political institutions. What was to be new in the American experiment was the lack of state intervention in the economy outside of the subsidies for industry. Human progress was to be tied to the growth of national economic prosperity, a prosperity that itself was driven by a class of men that were wealthy and intelligent. But the enduring aspect of his argument was in the depoliticization of capitalism and his unabashed inegalitarianism, something that would only see its like in American writers such as William Graham Sumner seventy years later and, of course, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first-centuries. Inequality was not to be based on ascripitve foundations—the door was “to be open to all”—but on economic merit. Those who were able to accumulate and therefore expand the powers of industry were to be encouraged to do so for the common good.

The general view was that rising economic growth would relieve the strains of inequality, but some were not so optimistic. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, it was becoming increasingly evident that the reality of economic inequality in America was actually threatening America’s republican experiment. The political economist John Taylor wrote in 1814 on the emergence of new monopolies and their legal protection by the state: “The idle, who seek for wealth by chartering laws, are wiser than their equalizing brethren [laborers]. Law has never been able to produce an equality of property, where industry exists, but it can produce its monopoly…. [L]aws for this end are as unconstitutional as those for reestablishing king, lords, and commons. Legal wealth and hereditary power are twin principles.”⁴⁶ A new generation of thinkers would emerge in the decades leading up to the Civil War. For some, economic divisions could be smoothed out; the interests of opposing classes harmonized. Classes—defined as different kinds of producers, agrarian or otherwise—would become more harmonious in an economic and political context defined by liberty and individualism, and the problem of economic inequality might be able to work itself out on its own. For others, the rising inequality was signaling a new economic order that was hardly benign and had to be transformed by organized action. Economic inequality became one of the most important issues in American political and social life, and from the early nineteenth century through to the present, it would be the one truly consistent set of divisions in American society.

For the thinkers of the early republic, economic inequality was an immediate reality, but its consequences remained little more than an abstraction. For the next generation and beyond, the reality would be considerably more concrete. Since the idea of a natural distribution of wealth based on individual effort and talent and regulated by the uncoerced nature of the market was the predominant paradigm for early American political economy, when it became obvious that the development of capitalism continued to have inegalitarian effects, approaches to the problem of economic inequality began to take on deeper political ramifications. The stakes were clearly higher since, in the minds of many thinkers in the first half of the nineteenth century, the debate about distributive justice was now being related to the fate of the democratic republican experiment itself.

American economic life was seen by some observers of the time as promoting a sort of economic equality that would prevent the emergence of hierarchical social relations reminiscent of feudalism. Tocqueville, in his second volume of Democracy in America, observed: “As the rules of social hierarchy are less strictly observed, as great ones fall and the humble rise, as poverty as well as wealth ceases to be hereditary, the distance separating master from workman daily diminishes both in fact and in men’s minds.”⁴⁷ Tocqueville reasoned that this was coming about since because was a market for labor and capital that promoted a “constant struggle about wages between those two classes,” where power was “thus divided.”⁴⁸ This would be a common theme in the decades running up to the Civil War: the idea that a free market for labor would lead to equality of condition was an optimistic view of the emerging economy.⁴⁹ But even Toqueville’s optimism was clearly tempered by what he saw as the emerging threat to equality and democracy that was at the root of American economic life: “But in our time there is one great and unfortunate exception. I have shown in a previous chapter how aristocracy, chased out of political society, has taken refuge in some parts of the world of industry and established its sway there in another shape…. As one must be very rich to embark on the great industrial undertakings of which I speak, the number of those engaged in them is very small. Being very few, they can easily league together and fix the rate of wages that pleases them.”⁵⁰ This would become an issue of hot debate for the remainder the antebellum period, not to mention still coloring the present debate on the relationship between classes through the twentieth century.

For the first time, especially for the group of radical critics of inequality, economic inequality and the new forms of organization that an emerging capitalism was putting forth were viewed as contradictory to the imperatives of political equality for which the American Revolution had been fought. Political and social thinkers saw rising inequality as more likely once modern industrial capitalism—something many of them knew was on the horizon—took footing. Only then would the corrosive effects of modern economic life threaten the republican fabric of moral, political, and economic cohesion that many of them saw as the hallmark of American society. Even more, it would threaten the equality of conditions that most Americans and foreign observers, such as Tocqueville, saw as America’s truly exceptional quality. If the first generation of American political and social thinkers saw the enemy as an outdated feudal aristocracy crushing equality, the new generation of the first half of the nineteenth century would see it as the emerging industrial and corporate class. They did not see the liberal conception of labor and property as a problem, however. Their ideas still mixed republican themes and a liberal economic ethic. The two were still cohesive in their minds since as long as individuals were allowed to work, produce, and accumulate according to their own labor, there would be no threat to republicanism. Only after the state sanctioned corporations was it seen that both the liberal economic ethic and the republican framework were in jeopardy. For the masters of industry did not labor for themselves but had others work for them, and the result would be the distortion of republican government since the few would soon have the power to subvert the ends of popular government.

But even as economic inequality began to surge in the few decades before the Civil War, the idea that there was, hidden beneath these inequities, a harmonious relationship among the various economic classes remained resilient. For early-nineteenth-century political economists, economic differentiation did not necessarily mean an unevenness of power. This kind of equality was envisioned through the discourse of “harmonization.” This notion had its roots in physiocratic ideas. Francois Quesnay’s Tableau economique argues that there was an inherent interdependence among the three classes that make up any economy: a “proprietary” or landowning class, an agricultural or “productive” class, and a “sterile” class of manufacturers and merchants. Quesnay’s argument was that a harmonization of interests among the three classes would emerge once the government saw that the productive class was the source of economic value since it was the only class capable of producing a surplus of goods.⁵¹ The surplus produced would pay for the goods of the manufacturing and merchant class, and the landowners would simply receive their payment as rent. In this way, it would become obvious that the three classes were, in effect, interdependent and that their economic interests and activities were not in competition but in harmony with one another.

This basic notion of the “harmonization of interests” was not lost on influential American political economists and social thinkers in the early nineteenth century. The American economy was still largely agrarian in nature, and the predominant view was that an associational economy—as opposed to a competitive one—led toward relative economic equality, preserved the ethos of economic autonomy and independence, and also would lessen the kind of social and political strife that would derive from extreme inequality. An associational economy also underscored the liberal ethos as the backbone of American political economy and the American character more broadly—not simply in terms of property but in the idea of individual labor and economic autonomy. It delineated a middle position against the radicals who called for the redistribution of property and denounced the intractable reality of the onslaught of the new capitalism.

The more radical set of ideas that emerged did not come out of imported European notions (with the exception of Robert Owen’s experiments), Rousseau, or the Levellers; they were derived from what was seen to be the initial ethical tenets of the American Revolution and the founding principles of American society and politics. The radical critique of economic inequality stressed the need for redistribution, the ending of special privileges, and an opposition to banks and new financial institutions that acted only as means for wealth accumulation. These institutions were regarded as tending toward a new aristocracy, one built on the backs of true and honest labor. The radical critics held that a moral economy based on the liberal ethic of individual labor and property was being shattered at the expense of self-interest and a narrow search for profit, which would result not only in inequality but in the destruction of the republican principles that American society embodied. Their critique was a defense of the economic autonomy of workers and an attack against all forms of wage servitude. The moral context of a free society was an economy that was based on labor that was itself oriented toward the ideal of self-sufficiency. Since this was seen as the sole purpose of labor and the market was simply a means of fair trade between honest producers, the appropriation of labor by others and the accumulation of profit from that appropriation was therefore the central object of the radical critique.

The theory of the harmonization of interests was most lucidly formulated by the political economist Henry C. Carey, and it would mark one of the first attempts by American political economists to deal with the problem of inequality in an overly optimistic way. Egalitarian in its outlook, Carey’s ideas were unwittingly an apologia for a new form of economics even as they were firmly grounded in the assumptions of agrarian and small-scale economic organization. His interpretation of the interaction between labor and capital accidentally supported the new, moderate economics because he wanted to show that the two groups’ interests were, in fact, one and the same and that inequality would in fact lessen as economic growth increased. Derived from his critical confrontation with the ideas of Ricardo rather than the older theory of Quesnay, Carey sought to prove a harmony of interests—that economic divisions between “labor” and “capitalists” were apparent at the surface but were, in actual fact, nothing more than illusion. He knew that arguments were raging about inequality and the need for distributive justice. But for him the American economy did not promote divisions and opposing interests, and a growth economy ought to be looked upon with optimism rather than the forecasts of doom that others hung upon it because it would, in the end, promote equity and prosperity at once.

In both The Harmony of Nature, published in 1836, and in Principles of Political Economy, published in 1838, Carey would put forth an argument that, he believed, penetrated the essence of the economic system, revealing its interdependence and its ability to produce equality or harmonization. Like Hamilton, he wanted to see the economy as unrelated to politics. But he was different in that he favored a view of the economy as self-regulating and—as long as it was contained in small- and medium-sized enterprises and economic communities—benevolent to all its participants in terms of egalitarianism. In this sense, there was no need for political intervention into the economy—his system articulated a combination of laissez-faire, prosperity, growth, and economic equality. For Carey, “economic man” operated within a nexus of cooperative interchange that traded in skills, services, and goods. “Capital,” in his usage of the term, was “any artifact or skill or knowledge that increases man’s power to direct natural events.”⁵² Wages and profits were one and the same, and when a situation of free competition existed, they would be fairly distributed by effort and skill.

Crucial for Carey was the idea that wages would rise as a competitive capitalist system grew. Competition for labor by capitalists would raise wages, but the real equalizing tendency would come from the nature of economic growth itself. Technical progress would allow capital to become more productive, and the quality of labor would increase. In this way, the ratio between the amount of capital needed to produce goods and the amount paid to workers would fall, and wages would rise relative to profits. Workers would become more valuable to employers since their productivity was rising. Similarly, since Carey made no distinction between capital and wages but saw them as essentially one and the same, he argued that the total amount of capital would increase even as employers’ profits decreased and the wages paid to workers grew. The result was a harmony of interests since workers and owners needed one another, and, in the long run, equality would result from the very dynamics of economic growth in a laissez-faire economy.

Despite the optimistic political economy posited by Carey, the literature of the time from 1820 to the Civil War was deeply marked by a radical discourse against inequality that was, interestingly enough, wholly home-grown. Indeed, in contrast to the post–Civil War era, when American radicalism was deeply affected by European ideas such as Marxism, the radical critique of inequality during the antebellum period was derived from the moral-political imperatives behind the ideas of the revolutionary generation. This critique held that equal rights in the political sphere was an impossibility without an equality of property. But this was not as crude as it was made out to be by opponents. Grounding their argument in a radicalized conception of the liberal theory of labor and property, these critics argued that the arising new form of economic complexity—that is, the evolving capitalism that was gaining in strength—was antithetical to the basic, natural rights that America supposedly embodied. Chastising what theorists like Carey saw as a benevolent economic system, they saw it as annihilating economic autonomy, eroding what they referred to as “civil rights,” and as ushering in a new aristocracy that would live parasitically off the labor of working people, the only real producers.

But even more, these radical critics of inequality saw that the force of property was once again emerging to destroy the liberal republican notion of political freedom. Indeed, what drove their critique was the realization that relations between employers and employees—characterized essentially by master-servant relations of power—were untouched by the revolution. Instead, these critics held that the new form of economic life that was emerging—industrial capitalism—articulated relations of domination and control reminiscent of the feudal past. The individual was no longer able to keep what he had labored for, on the one hand, and the relations between citizens were refeudalizing, on the other. They sensed what we know today to be the case: that the rise of market society itself was unable to destroy the preliberal labor relations that carried over from the feudal era. And it was these relations that they sought to overturn.⁵³

The American economy would change rapidly and drastically from 1820 through 1860, and this would set the stage for the radical egalitarians and their attack on inequality and what they saw as the emergence of a new form of servitude and aristocracy. By 1860, income and wealth inequality were staggering. Brought on by the introduction of the factory system and the proliferation of wage labor—as well as the decreasing ability of the “family farm” to provide an adequate living standard—a pattern of distribution emerged that would not only invoke the wrath of the radical egalitarians but also set the stage for the post–Civil War era and its own battle with inequality.⁵⁴ By 1860, the top 5 percent of American families held ownership of over half of the nation’s total wealth, and the top 10 percent possessed over 70 percent. In Philadelphia alone, 1 percent of the families owned over 50 percent of the city’s total wealth; the lower 80 percent controlled a mere 3 percent.

These patterns of inequality, as well as the growing power of banks and corporations, were setting the stage for the discourse of the radical egalitarians and their attack on the changing American economy. They were radical precisely because they sought to use the political ideals of equality to confront the economic order of their time, an order that was increasingly defined by wage labor and an inequality between labor and capital. Their radicalism consisted in this opposition and their commitment to extending the economic egalitarian impulse of the American Revolution and the project of constructing a republic founded on liberty and equity. They upheld the ideal of liberal republicanism, but they were reacting to new shifts in economic life and economic structure. They saw that the state had to regulate economic life in order to protect republican principles—whether in terms of redistributing property or preventing the excesses of monopoly—but this was to be done in order to protect the ability of each individual to labor and preserve his independence. The liberal economic ethic and the ideas of republicanism were inseparable. They made the connection between labor, power, and property. The basic idea was that property flowed from labor; but when labor itself became the property of others, then the very foundation of independence, the freedom from servitude, was placed in peril.

All the radical critics of inequality during the period saw the political nature of economic inequality, and the institution of wage labor, charters, and other moves toward modern capitalism were the immediate targets of their critique. In The Rights of Man to Property! (1829), Thomas Skidmore made this evident in his opening preface:

For radicals like Skidmore, the link between inequality and politics was clear: by allowing an unequal distribution of property to proliferate and worsen, let alone exist at all, the political ideals of individuality, liberty, and equality would all be subverted to the interests of capital, opulence, and idleness. The country’s workers would forfeit any semblance of economic independence, and the social and political liberty that it bestowed, to economic dependence, which would mark the beginning of the decline of political freedom and justice. Economic and political equality were therefore inherently connected since they were one and the same thing: a man could not be free if his labor was appropriated by another. Skidmore summed it up in a moral slogan that was as simple in its formulation as it was profound in its implications: “all men should live on their labor, and not on the labor of others.”⁵⁶ Skidmore’s solution was redistribution by the state. Property was not to be handed down generation after generation but taken by the state after the owner’s death. The state would hold this property in common only to divide and redistribute it for the next generation. This republican policy sought to encourage the liberal economic ethic: since there was no way for equality to flourish in the midst of unequal wealth and property, the state would need to enforce that equality so that each man would be able to work for himself. Radicals like Skidmore saw that the republican and liberal ideas about economic and political life needed to be applied in tandem.

The ideas of critics like Skidmore were hardly unique. Rather, they fit into the context of the larger worker movement that was beginning to thrive in Philadelphia and New York, which also railed against inequality and the kind of economic servitude that would emerge from it.⁵⁷ But these ideas also fit into the broader context of the egalitarian tradition. These radical thinkers confronted inequality and highlighted not only the negative effects that it had with respect to economic affairs and “fairness,” but the larger impact it had on morality, happiness, servitude, and freedom.⁵⁸ They did not back away from characterizing inequality as patterning a new set of social relationships bent on re-creating aristocracy and barbarism. Theophilus Fisk, another of the radical critics, addressed a crowd of the “mechanics” of Boston arguing that “the history of the producers of wealth, of the industrious classes, is that of a continued warfare of honesty against fraud, weakness against power, justice against oppression.”⁵⁹ Many of these thinkers, such as Langton Byllesby and John Pickering, were influenced by the ideas of Robert Owen and the New Harmony colony in Indiana, a radical experiment in equality and economic cooperation. Owen theorized that the growth of technology—or, as he referred to it, “mechanism”—was inherently accompanied by extreme economic inequalities. This was attributable to the fact that human selfishness was a product of unrestrained competition and greed. As a remedy, he advocated expanding public works and education to help workers in times of economic stagnation and depression and, most important, basing the economic organization of society on small, self-sufficient, and cooperative communities.

Even more, the radicals highlighted the power relations that were inherent in these emerging patterns of economic inequality. There is no mistaking the fact that they approached the subject from the point of view of political equality and that they did not see a separation between the abstract equality of political rights and the substantive equality that ought to be inherent in the economic sphere. There was a very real consciousness that America’s political project of abolishing servitude and bondage—with the obvious exception of Southern slavery—was now under assault. There was no questioning the fact that a new set of power relationships—which were replicating the old feudalistic patterns of the aristocracy—was emerging with the onset of modern capitalism. Stephen Simpson, writing in 1831 in his book The Working Man’s Manual, saw the stakes clearly. Unequal wealth was caused by the new legal institutions such as corporations and chartered monopolies (essentially one and the same for the radicals) and their ability to re-create the hierarchical power relations of the past with great ease. This, Simpson claimed, was due to the growing influence of “Law” rather than the rightful place of industry, of working men. “I use the term Law as a generic word, embracing all the details that affect the distribution of wealth, such as moneyed corporations, chartered monopolies, and that endless chain of levers which move industry to empty her gains into the lap of capital, and which effectively frustrate and defeat the grand object of rational self-government on the basis of individual freedom and personal merit.”⁶⁰

For Simpson, there was no mistaking the fact that this was leading to a re-creation of the servitude of working people to the wealthy and the essential destruction of equality and freedom. Drawing a parallel to the feudal systems of all nations of the past, Simpson was able to make his claim that America was witnessing a degeneration of its most cherished and important political and moral ideal, that of equality itself.

This emphasis on the connection between political rights and economic reality was no mere rhetorical device; it expressed the confusion and the anger that the emerging economic system was evoking in working people as the economic society was changing it basis from small economic communities to larger ones of wage and factory labor.⁶² Inequality was a consequence because the divide between owners and workers had grown in intensity. For radicals like Simpson, there was no questioning the effects of inequality: it was leading to a condition of serfdom less than half a century after the revolution had shaken off those archaic institutions of servitude.

Politics could be used against economics. Indeed, it had to be used to reign in the excesses of the new economy and defend the political ideals upon which the “principles of the Declaration of Independence” had been founded. Simpson, like the other radical egalitarian critics of his time, saw that the political principles of equality and the emphasis on the common good were being eroded by the ability of economic interests to outweigh the political interests of the whole community. Working people therefore had a political obligation to use politics against the interests of a minority that sought nothing less than their oppression and the elimination of their political and social rights:

Radical critics of inequality therefore were not intent on a radicalization of politics; their intent was simply the utilization of already present political institutions against the interests of corporate wealth. Working people were not unlike a universal subject “placed by nature in a moral and physical attitude which conspire to carry perfection all the attributes that ennoble his mind and procure happiness to his being, presents to the world the imposing spectacle of Liberty and Reason combining to consummate Justice.”⁶⁴

Langton Byllesby’s Observations on the Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth was also the product of this emerging worker culture. Published in 1826, it was the first sustained analysis of economic inequality in America, and at its core was the political imperative of the equal right of all to the pursuit of happiness and the “Inaptitude of the primitive and existing institutions to admit that right, by their generation of unequal wealth, and warlike inclinations, through the assumption of fixed property in the soil, the introduction and perversion of the uses of money and the system of trafficking.”⁶⁵ Wealth was the product of labor and this was, in Byllesby’s view, a universal truism: man had the right to the products of his own labor, and this was the source of the pursuit of happiness and of true equality. With the rise of new economic systems of ownership and production—specifically the erosion of the older forms of craft production and the move toward industrial production—new forms of ownership began to arise. Inequality was the result of this transformation, and for Byllesby, what was at stake was nothing less than the possibility of true freedom as a result of this new system and its inegalitarian implications.

The ownership of property was not at issue, but that property was supposed to be the product of individual labor. Unequal distribution of wealth was therefore tied to the destruction of the pursuit of happiness because the economy was the means to that end. The rich capture labor that is not theirs, amass great wealth, and tie workers to their own economic interests, “thereby destroying the equality of means, and essentially the equality of right, to the ‘pursuit of happiness’ and enjoyment, however the sufferers may be deluded with the notion that they still retain that right.”⁶⁶ In an argument similar to Rousseau’s philosophical explanation of the origin of inequality, Byllesby held that it was perpetuated by the ignorance of the majority, who unwittingly accept their own systemic disenfranchisement. As a solution, he advocated the emergence of labor organizations that would be able to press for equal divisions of the fruits of labor. The link between political rights and economic conditions would prove important for the radical critics. They were able to see that the move toward economic modernity would effectively change the character of their political rights, that a move toward wage labor was consequently a substantial move away from the conception of economic autonomy that they held dear and that was seen as the material foundation of all political notions of liberty and self-determination. Unlike Carey or the economists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they did not invest the economic system with seemingly natural powers, and they were able to see that economic inequality was the beginning of a long slide toward servitude.

Theodore Sedgwick pointed to the destructive capabilities of “corporate grants,” which would give power to a minority of the community over the whole. Writing in 1835 as “a citizen of New York,” Sedgwick cast his argument in terms of the direct relationship between government, corporate interests, and access to social power:

What radicalism brought to the table—aside from its political perspective on equality and its populist rhetoric—was an analysis of the new economic organization of society and an analytical perspective that penetrated into the mechanisms of inequality itself. Whereas thinkers like Carey were concerned with analyzing the economic community and the interdependence of the different classes that were its constituent parts, the radicals—taking the labor theory of property as their central moral and social scientific lens—looked to the relation between employer and employee, between wealth and labor and the way that these relationships were constituted and the way that they perpetuated themselves. William Gouge, in A Short History of Paper Money and Banking in the United States, looks at the way that banking distorted the “natural” distribution of wealth by privileging owners over producers. The resulting inequality would affect more than the individual. “It is not easy to set bounds to the effects of a single act of injustice. If you deprive a man of his property, you may thereby deprive him of the means of properly educating his children and thus affect the moral and intellectual character of his descendants for several generations.”⁷⁰ This, Gouge argued, was an effect of modern commerce, which was itself bound to a reproductive cycle that would continuously generate inequality in wealth between classes, cleaving society in two:

The problem was seen to be more than the emergence of inequality itself. Many of these critics of inequality were reacting against the emergence of the banking system in the early nineteenth century. But it should be emphasized that this critique was not meant simply to bring down the banking interests; there was also the deeper, more important political issue of the emergence of monopoly, plutocracy, and aristocracy. John Vethake, writing in the New York Evening Post on October 21, 1835, described the reasoning behind the antimonopoly position. For Vethake, as for the other radical critics, the problem was a systemic one with civilizational consequences:

Orestes Brownson’s essay “The Laboring Classes” of 1840 pointed out that inequality was not simply the result of banks and privilege. The system itself worked in such a way so as to effectively rob those who labored of their own property. Merchants did this by artificially adding price to what was already produced. Remuneration was no longer based on effort, skill, and labor. It was increasingly becoming based on “mischievous social arrangements” created by the drive for profits and the manipulation of the market: “It may be laid down as a general rule, with but few exceptions, that men are rewarded in an inverse ratio to the amount of actual service they perform.”⁷⁴ Readers of Marx’s more sophisticated analysis of the labor process under capitalism will undoubtedly find a rough affinity with the theory of the working day.

Similarly, the opening lines of John Pickering’s book The Working Man’s Political Economy (1847) argue that “men do not accumulate property in proportion to their industry; but the reverse is the fact.” Pickering saw that “capitalists” and the economic system that they were promoting was in contradiction with the basic tenets of American liberty: “the argument so often brought forward to sustain the positions of those who advocate the justice and propriety of granting special privileges, under a government based upon the principle of equal rights, falls to the ground.”⁷⁵ Going back to the labor theory of property was therefore a radical move: it stood in the face of wage servitude—something that Brownson and other radicals saw as particularly pernicious—and, more important, it would restore what was “natural” against what was “artificial.” Reliance on the labor theory of property—perceived as a natural right—meant that the accumulation of great wealth was not the fruit of individual labor but of the appropriation of labor by capitalists. Herein was the crucial aspect of the new economic system that would crush the rights of man, equality, and liberty and usher in a new age of dependency and servitude as well as massive economic disparities of wealth and power.

In the decades preceding the Civil War, America was not falling back into the older political forms of aristocracy or tyranny, as the early revolutionary generation had feared. The economic inequality that manifested itself as the middle of the century approached meant, most immediately, the loss of the economic independence of workers. It is therefore little surprise that Whigs of the period and the rhetoric of the Jacksonian era were so critical of inequality.⁷⁶ Locofocos like William Leggett saw that the emergence of new ideas of property—such as those endorsed by “banking incorporations”—were overcoming the political ideals of equality. Opulence was being protected at the expense of the poor. Where did the wealthy gain the opulence one saw in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston? “They owe [it] to special privileges; to that system of legislation which grants peculiar facilities to the opulent, and forbids the use of them to the poor; to that pernicious code of laws which considered the rights of property as an object of greater moment than the rights of man.”⁷⁷ The economy was becoming intertwined with political power, creating a legally sanctioned aristocracy, and the rights of man, which had previously been heralded by the revolution and its generation, were hanging on the edge of a precipice.

The radicals still wanted equality of condition, but they saw that it would be the natural outgrowth of an equality of effort and labor—effectively of an equality of opportunity. But the new economic relationships were smashing the foundations for any equality of opportunity, and the radicals therefore concentrated their critique on the system itself rather than a narrow emphasis on opportunity.⁷⁸ Their economic ideas were informed by a normative sense that wage servitude and economic dependence were fundamentally against the political principles of America’s republican democracy. They would result in nothing less than the total disenfranchisement of working people and lead to a new form of inequality where wealth and opulence ruled over the laboring masses. Indeed, most Americans knew that anything akin to perfect equality was illusory and utopian, but they did recognize that relative equality of condition was the product of the rewards garnered from honest labor and a natural distribution of reward from individual effort and the freedom from economic and political dependency.

Since capitalism was evolving not in the agrarian sector but in the cities, it was the manual laborers and “mechanics” that were to feel its initial effects—but they were the minority of the overall American economy, which was still predominantly agrarian or bound to smaller economic communities. The problem was seen to be institutional in nature: capitalism had to be opposed because it corrupted the economic base of the time, which was, in itself, the realization of certain political principles such as equality and liberty. The small, self-sufficient, self-employed, independent, and unincorporated kind of enterprises that most people were engaged in was the realization of those political ideas. Any threat to that form of economic organization was also an attack on the realization of those American political principles. They did not seek state intervention in the economy—that, in their view, was not necessary. All that was needed was for charters and banks to be disbanded; for the law to properly award property and wealth to those that actually produced—that is, worked or labored—for it. Skidmore wanted a radical redistribution of property; Byllesby believed that “associations” of workers could organize to protect their interests from the effects or “evils” of unrestrained competition. For Carey and the radicals alike, free competition was not the cause of the problem, but the radicals knew that the manipulation of labor and property by a new economic class was the source of inequality and that the real mechanism of inequality was contained in the economic relationship between workers and owners.⁷⁹ Only the radicals were able to connect these concerns with the categories of political equality and freedom, and they did so through a curious blend of Lockean liberal ideas about the value of labor and the broader vision of which institutions ought to regulate the excesses of economic activity and the emergence of wealth. They were critics of asymmetrical social power, but they effected their criticism through a fluid combination of liberalism and republicanism. To be sure, they accepted the idea that individual labor was the source of wealth as well as equality, but they rejected Lockean ideas such as the ability to claim ownership through the payment of wages, a core aspect of Locke’s prepolitical state of nature and a crucial addition to his labor theory of value. Instead, they argued that there was a conception of the common good that needed to be enforced: unequal wealth would be the path toward a new feudalism and the destruction of liberty.

Their movement failed, but not because their arguments were not heard. Their critiques of inequality resounded with skilled laborers and new workers in a rapidly changing economic system. The move to large-scale industrialism would render calls for the abolition of wage labor obsolete. The new economic imperatives gathering force as industrialism progressed were met with a demand for new forms of employment. The very culture and institutions of work were rapidly changing, and in the process, the radical call for equality would not diminish but would be overshadowed by the national crisis that burst onto the scene with the Civil War. In many ways, the legacy of the radical egalitarians was their insistence on an institutional critique of the production process as well as the links they constructed between wage labor, inequality, and the demise of worker autonomy and political and social equality. Even more, the radical critics of inequality showed that they were conscious that the principles of the American republic were intertwined with economic forces. Equality was not an ideological concern; it was a concrete political issue with fundamental economic dimensions.