Bad for Everyone
In Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, life expectancy depends not on fraternal feeling but on the neighborhood you live in. Reside in an impoverished neighborhood and you can expect an average of sixty-eight precarious years; live about a mile away in a wealthy neighborhood and you can look forward to eighty-eight years. And that gap between the life expectancy of the poor and that of the rich has been growing in recent years, as the level of inequality between the very rich and nearly everyone else has been increasing. Some of the consequences of this trend are obvious to anyone who follows the news. A multimillionaire president has appointed several billionaires to his cabinet, and Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, was tasked with making the government more “efficient”—that is, smaller—so that people like himself could enjoy lower taxes. But other consequences of inequality may be less obvious.
In The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx, David Lay Williams aims both to show how economic inequality has been a central theme in the history of political philosophy from Plato to Marx and why it is the worst problem that can plague a society. For Williams, “contemporary opponents of inequality have failed to outline why inequality is problematic.” Economists have shown that inequality is real, but they lack the tools to show why it is bad. Progressives, while decrying inequality, often lack the intellectual or moral language to articulate the grounds of their opposition. We are like a patient who knows he is sick without understanding what harm his disease can cause. Such a patient may not pursue treatment, especially if it is disruptive. By drawing on thinkers such as Plato, Jesus, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Mill, Williams demonstrates that economic inequality is more like the bubonic plague than the cold. We need treatment and we need it now.
Williams structures each chapter the same way. He describes the socioeconomic context in which specific thinkers wrote, their critical evaluation of inequality, and their proposed solutions. This framework allows Williams to prove that economic inequality has been an integral concern throughout the history of Western political thought. He succeeds in showing that even thinkers like Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes, who hardly have a reputation for egalitarianism, argued that inequality was corrosive to society. The founding thinker of capitalist economics was convinced that inequality corrupted the rich, divided society, and enervated the poor. Hobbes wanted to consolidate sovereignty, in part, because of the divisive effects of the wealthy concentrating power and refusing to pay taxes.
Political thought and action require taking seriously the work of minimizing or eliminating inequality. The problem with Williams’s approach is that he makes economic inequality seem perennial. Whether we are in ancient Greece, early-modern England, or contemporary Philadelphia, inequality appears as a constant. A reader could easily come away with the impression that inequality is an iron law of civilization: you can either resign yourself to it or take advantage of it. Today, in the United States, most of us are resigning ourselves to it, while a few are making all the money. This is certainly not what Williams is striving for, but an air of inevitability haunts his book. Williams could have done more to underscore the importance of collective agency in determining just how unequal any particular society is.
Here the plague metaphor is instructive. Deadly viruses have been present throughout history but not to the same degree in every time and place, and modern vaccines have done much to reduce the number of people who die from infectious disease. Knowing this should lead us to redouble our efforts rather than resign ourselves to devastating epidemics as if they were acts of God. Seeing the ubiquity of economic inequality should likewise redouble our efforts to overcome it.
Inequality is a plague for three reasons; it is bad for society as a whole, bad for the poor, and bad for the rich. Plato’s Republic calls inequality a plague because it causes social divisions and can lead to civil war. Cities that suffer from this disease—cities like Philadelphia—“are effectively two cities rather than one.” This theme of division is articulated differently throughout the history of political thought, but it remains consistent. Class inequality leads to division and conflict.
Inequality is particularly bad for the poor. This might seem obvious, but it is contested by “sufficientarians,” who argue that as long as the poor are doing fine in absolute terms, it doesn’t matter if the rich are doing much better in relative terms. Of course, the poor are often not doing fine. Whether we’re talking about the poor in England who could only afford flour mixed with sawdust or the ongoing history of debt peonage, poverty hurts.
But even when the poor have enough to meet their needs, inequality is still bad for them. First, because what counts as poverty is bound to change over time. A car in 1910 was a luxury; now, in many places, it is a necessity. And just as poverty is historically relative, it is inevitably comparative. Drawing on Marx, Williams argues that “even as workers earn more, capitalists are making proportionally much more.” Even if a life expectancy of sixty-eight years means the poor are living longer than they did in the past, it is still unjust that they are living, on average, twenty fewer years than the rich. Furthermore, economic inequality disempowers the poor. Real political equality never really exists in conditions of extreme economic inequality—as the example of Elon Musk constantly reminds us. Finally, as Adam Smith and Karl Marx argue, poverty degrades the poor because of the deadening effects of precarity and alienating work.
Perhaps more surprisingly, inequality is also bad for the rich. It produces the vice of pleonexia, or greed. This is a real sickness, for “those infected with pleonexia are reduced to desire more without the possibility of satisfaction. No matter how much they acquire, they will want more.” They are restless and perpetually unhappy. But greed is not their only problem; great wealth is itself a burden, whether or not one thirsts for more of it. For Williams, the immorality of great wealth is best expressed by Jesus, who famously declared “woe to you rich” (Luke 6:24). Williams writes that “to accumulate massive fortunes is, for Jesus, to choose mammon over God.” The concentration of wealth means that the “opulent class had abandoned God and God’s law.” Hoarding their wealth means surrendering “their souls in a pleonastic quest to enrich themselves at the expense of their less fortunate neighbors.” Jesus taught that wealth can quite easily land you in hell. Thus, the transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor doesn’t only help the poor; it might also save the souls of the rich—in this life and the next. Whether the reader is Christian or not, the point is similar: wealth corrupts because you cannot serve both it and God—or goodness. In either case, you’re better off without too much of it.
Any account of sickness requires some understanding of what health might look like. For Adam Smith, inequality destroys the social good of mutual sympathy. Williams writes that if sympathy “pervades society, citizens look to one another as vested partners in a joint mission rather than as competitors for scarce resources.” While Smith was reluctant to have the government foster mutual sympathy by reducing inequality, most of the thinkers in Williams’s book believed there was a place for robust state action in fostering and leveraging that sympathy. Here, Plato remains foundational because he puts before us the essential question: What should be the aim of society? His response (like Pope Francis’s) is that we should aim for “fraternal bonds and the happiness of the whole.” Equality enables and is enabled by such fraternal bonds, which in turn lead to happiness for the whole community. Inequality means that only a minority flourishes while cutting itself off from the suffering of the majority. We should be aiming to make “the city as a whole happy.” Doing so might make lives of the poor not just longer, but fuller in every way.
Fraternity, mutual sympathy, and social solidarity have been disappearing over the past few decades. This causes, and is caused by, greater inequality. The dismantling of the war on poverty coincided with the collapse of political solidarity in the United States. Catholics bear some responsibility for this development, as we have increasingly decided to ignore the Church’s teachings on wealth, greed, and poverty. When the bishops called for “economic justice for all” in 1986, too many Catholics supported policies that promoted economic justice for some. When John Paul II called for the preferential option for the poor in the 1980s, many Catholics voted for politicians who preached the preferential option for the rich. Today, many Catholics support Trump’s oligarchic regime while ignoring Catholic social thought and those pesky words of Jesus: blessed are the poor and woeful are the rich.
Williams believes that ideas matter, and that they can help fix this situation. I agree, but I also think we need something deeper than a different set of ideas. We need a true conversion of heart. We need to care about the kids struggling to get out of childhood alive, the overworked refugees facing deportation, and, yes, the rich who are in danger of losing their souls. Inequality means shorter lives for many, a more brutal society for all, and spiritual death for the rich. We need conversion if we are going to care enough to change the systems that allow this plague to spread. Williams’s book provides a good diagnosis, but the cure will require more than a good argument; it will require a movement capable of inspiring a radical change in the way we live.
The Greatest of All Plagues
How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx
David Lay Williams
Princeton University Press
$35 | 424 pp.
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