A short history of thinking about inequality
Chapter 3
Radically Normal, part 3 of 7 · Series overview · Dieses Kapitel auf Deutsch
The question of inequality – where it comes from, and to what degree it can be justified – is one of the oldest questions in philosophy. Even in antiquity, people wondered how much the possessions of citizens could be allowed to differ without endangering the foundations of communal life. The selection that follows is just that, a selection, but I hope it conveys how the debate about inequality has evolved.
From Plato to Marx
According to Plato (c. 427–347 BC), it would be appropriate for human societies if the richest owned no more than four times as much as the poorest. His goal was an orderly coexistence that avoids extreme differences. Aristotle (384–322 BC) held more generally that wealth is best distributed across a large middle class. Poor and rich classes were to be avoided, because they would breed characters and social forces that make for instability.
After the subject had received little attention from major thinkers for many centuries, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) turned to the origins of inequality in the eighteenth century and concluded that they coincided with the invention of property. The first man to fence in a piece of land and declare “this is mine,” he argued, ushered in social division. From then on, people no longer stood on the same footing; a lasting divide emerged, bringing dependence and oppression in its wake.
William Godwin (1756–1836), father of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, likewise saw inequality as a moral problem. It corrupts people at both ends of the wealth spectrum, he said: the rich, because possession and power deform them, and the poor, because they are humiliated and disenfranchised. Still, he trusted that people would rationally conclude, without state interference, that they should share with one another. Rather than relying on institutions, they could overcome inequality through moral action.
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) embodies the shift in emphasis from moral questions to practical rules. In the mid-nineteenth century, he drew a clear line between production and distribution. While production, in his view, followed natural laws and technological development, the distribution of what is produced lay within society’s discretion. Mill thus stressed that inequality must not be understood as an inevitable consequence of the economy: how goods are distributed is always a political decision.
Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) radicalized this view. For them, inequality was an inescapable consequence of private ownership of the means of production and the resulting exploitation of labor. Their answer was the complete abolition of such ownership. Only when factories, machines, and land were no longer in private hands could the division into classes be overcome.
Thinkers since the Second World War
Toward the middle of the twentieth century, Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) argued that a market economy left entirely to its own devices would destroy society. Treating labor, land, and money like ordinary commodities was, he held, impossible in the long run. Societies therefore respond with countermovements such as regulation and social policy, re-embedding the market so that it works in line with people’s interests.
John Rawls (1921–2002) later proposed a thought experiment that remains among the most influential approaches in the theory of justice. Inequality, he argued, can be justified only if it benefits the worst-off. Moreover, societies should always be organized in such a way that those who design them could accept ending up worst-off themselves. They would make such decisions behind a “veil of ignorance.”
Amartya Sen (b. 1933) broadened the view of inequality beyond the financial to the perspective of capabilities. Income alone is not enough if there is no access to health, education, or political participation. For him, inequality is measured by the real opportunities people have to shape their lives according to their own ideas.
Thomas Piketty (b. 1971), looking at historical data, found that inequality grows when returns on capital outpace the economy as a whole over long periods. In such phases, the gap between owners and non-owners widens. His proposal – a global wealth tax and more progressive income taxes – was meant to counteract this mechanism.
Branko Milanovic (b. 1953) widened the lens to global inequality. He showed that while differences between countries are shrinking, the divide within many societies is deepening. Seen globally, a new middle class has emerged, above all in Asia, while the old middle class in Western industrialized countries stagnates or falls behind.
The journalist Ulrike Herrmann (b. 1964) brought the ecological limits of growth into the debate. She argued that capitalism cannot function without growth, and that a planned, rationed post-growth society is therefore necessary – one that respects the planet’s limited resources. Growth on a finite planet cannot continue indefinitely, and any debate about inequality must take this fact into account.
Most recently, the philosopher Ingrid Robeyns (b. 1972) revived the idea of an upper limit on wealth with her book Limitarianism. In doing so, she ties back directly to Plato after more than two millennia and shows that the question of capping wealth has lost none of its relevance. And there are many more important thinkers whom I cannot name in this short overview.
A debate without a vision
From antiquity to the present, thinking about inequality has grown steadily more nuanced. Some thinkers saw upper limits on wealth, others a just distribution, still others the need to tame markets or to look at capabilities rather than income. What they share is the insight that differences that grow too large have destructive consequences – for individuals and for society as a whole.
In today’s public debate, the question of inequality does come up again and again. But the view of what would be desirable – and what we could shape in principle – remains largely in the background, despite important contributions such as Robeyns’s.
If we set aside populist scapegoating of migrants or the “lazy unemployed,” what dominates the media and social networks is a fatalism that considers change unrealistic, a focus on individual advancement, and, at best, technocratic fixes.
Let me put it bluntly: it is part of everyday politics today to argue over whether people deserve a basic livelihood if they fail to deliver what “society” expects of them. A debate about clear limits to wealth, by contrast, is practically taboo on the big channels and in the major newspapers.
To bring this taboo into focus, I want to put forward a goal that is simple at its core – and memorable enough that many people can wield it in the debate about justice: the 10x principle.