Dick Pountain /The Political Quarterly/ 11 Nov 2024 04:41
The Greatest Of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato To Marx by David Lay Williams: Princeton University Press; Sept 2024; pp424; £30.00
Pleonexia is a Greek word that means insatiable greed, avarice, covetousness, a desire to have more without limit. Think of it as an opposite to anorexia: eating nothing versus eating everything. David Lay Williams' book is about economic inequality as perceived and condemned by seven great thinkers from Plato to Marx, all of whom were familiar with the word, and employed it in their condemnations. In fact “Pleonexia, the Greatest of All Plagues” would have been another excellent title for this book (though he and PUP wisely chose a less arcane one). The book is specifically about economic, as opposed to other forms of inequality:
“...unless otherwise expressly stated, when speaking of 'economic inequality,' I mean what economists sometimes call 'wealth inequality', as opposed to 'income inequality'. Although income and wealth are often strongly correlated, sometimes they are not.”
So it's not another account of the politics and sociology of inequality but rather an exploration in moral philosophy - spanning 2300 years of history - of the attitudes of Plato (a classical republican); Jesus Christ (founder of Christianity); Thomas Hobbes (monarchist); Jean-Jacques Rousseau (early modern republican); Adam Smith (classical liberal); John Stuart Mill (utilitarian); and Karl Marx (communist), not all of whom are radical egalitarians. Indeed Plato, Jesus, Hobbes and Smith are more often invoked by conservatives, but Williams convincingly demonstrates that despite their differences on other social and economic matters, they all understood that vast wealth gaps corrode the fabric of society, degrade politics and loosen family ties. Inequality lies at the root of the collapse of most empires and civilisations.
Williams avoids presenting detailed economic statistics for the era of each thinker, instead referring to such work by other experts like Thomas Piketty, Walter Scheidel and Charles Lindblom. Similarly he doesn’t devote much space to detailed analysis of the mechanism by which inequality erodes the social fabric, leaving that too to sociologists like Wilkinson and Pickett or Mike Savage (his bibliography runs to 24 pages). What he embarks on instead is to demonstrate that all his chosen thinkers believed that economic inequality is wrong, and to show that reasons for this judgement evolved over time, from Plato’s sickness of the soul (pleonexia) to Karl Marx’s capitalist who “ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake”.
His purpose directly concerns contemporary politics as he seeks to unmask various ways in which current commentators of both Left and Right are misinterpreting these thinkers to ignore or to justify the rapidly increasing inequality which so obviously lead to Donald Trump’s devastating election victory in November 2024. The billionaire moguls of Silicon Valley who 20 years ago appeared mostly sympathetic to the Democrats have pivoted to Trump: Elon Musk pranced on platforms with him; Jeff Bezos forbade his Washington Post editors to endorse a candidate (ie. Harris); while Mark Zuckerberg announced that he’d made a “20-year mistake” and “political miscalculation”. The stock price rally following Trump’s victory increased their collective fortunes by $64 billion overnight...
Right-wing free-market followers of Hayek and Friedman claim that economic egalitarianism is an invention of twentieth-century liberals, and that the Western canon from Plato to Smith uniformly supports inequality, so inequality’s critics are merely expressing resentment and envy of the wealthy. But Williams contends that many Left opponents of inequality also fail to produce convincing arguments for why it’s wrong, leaving them exposed to such an envy slur. Some other Left-wing critics regard poverty to be the more important moral problem and concentrated wealth and inequality to be morally less relevant: “fight poverty, not inequality.” Steven Pinker for example makes the 'sufficientarian' argument that feeding, housing and clothing the poor outweighs concern over excessive wealth.
Williams devotes a separate chapter to each of his thinkers. Today we see Plato as an elitist, given that his ideal republic was to be ruled only by philosophers and maintained by slaves, but Williams argues that one must looks past this (slavery was ubiquitous in that epoch) to his major political works ‘Republic’ and ‘Laws’, which show a concern for economic equality among free citizens. He claimed these citizens needed to possess four primary virtues – wisdom, moderation, justice, and courage – and that greed, inequality and oligarchy corroded all three, leading to social disharmony and civil war. This wasn’t merely a theoretical conclusion: fifth-century Athens experienced two oligarchic coups against democracy, followed by periods of reform under Solon and Lycurgus, and Plato learned from this history that extreme wealth, poverty, and inequality don’t only collapse political regimes but also distort individual souls through insatiable greed, or pleonexia, which was therefore “the greatest of all plagues” (Laws, 744d).
In one of the smaller colonies of the Roman Empire an egalitarian tendency existed among Hebrew-speaking tribes, whose prophets had written for centuries against the evils of excessive wealth and usury. In the 7th century BC Palestine had a fertile agriculture that enabled landlords to accumulate wealth, and the prophet Amos decries the way they exploited peasant farmers by loaning them money and appropriating their lands when they failed to repay. The religious authorities tried to defuse this class antagonism using the Mosaic Law, which prescribed that every seventh year be a ‘sabbath year’ during which slaves were freed, debts cancelled and land left fallow for the poor to forage. Every seventh sabbatical year was a ‘jubilee’ which restored all land to its original owners. Needless to say such radically distributive policies were enforced less and less as religious leaders became wealthy themselves, and by the time Jesus of Nazareth was born, in Galilee province, he founded a new Christian religion by expelling moneylenders from the Temple.
Thomas Hobbes is now remembered for ‘Leviathan’, in which he strongly advocates concentration of all power in a monarch, in reaction to the chaos unleashed by the English Civil War. His economic ideas are therefore also often assumed to favour the emerging merchant capitalism, but Williams points out that in his other great work ‘Behemoth’ Hobbes relates that a growing concentration of wealth among the merchant class made them ‘insolent and presumptuous of impunity’ eventually rising to threaten the sovereign authority, and precipitating violent civil war. Hobbes was keenly aware that as feudal patronage slowly gave way to open markets, inflation seriously eroded the livelihood of ex-peasants as they became wage labourers.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau inaugurated the modern attitude to inequality, calling it by that name in ‘Discourse on the Origin of Inequality’ and questioning the legitimacy of rulers who abuse their authority to protect the wealthy from the poor. He held that legitimate authority only exists by common consent and by pursuing the common good, and that in economically unequal societies “the apparent power is in the hands of the magistrate and the real power is in those of the rich” – the ideas that provided the intellectual impetus for the French Revolution.
Adam Smith remains the doyen of free-market enthusiasts everywhere, but Williams convincingly demonstrates that even he was grievously concerned over the detrimental effect of economic inequality on social cohesion, as for example in ‘The Wealth Of Nations’ where he remarked “Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many”. The result, as Eric Hobsbawm once observed, was that industrial relations in the first half of the eighteenth century could be described as “collective bargaining by riot.” John Kay, inventor of the flying shuttle used in the weaving machines that displaced countless workers, was forced to flee Britain after his home was destroyed by an angry mob in 1753.
Williams thereafter arrives at the more familiar and (perhaps) less contested path to modern opposition to inequality via the utilitarian liberalism of John Stuart Mill and the outright communism of Karl Marx. Each of his seven chapters ends with a conclusion summarising that thinker’s suggested measures to combat economic inequality, ranging from alms-giving, to Lycurgus’ abolition of gold and silver currency, from debt sabbaths to highly progressive wealth taxes and restrictions on inheritance, to educational reform or socialist revolution.
Stopping with Marx feels like quitting just as it gets interesting as Williams is well aware, but he ruefully admits that to proceed into the 20th century with its two world wars, revolutions, organised labour and welfare states, would require a whole extra book. That’s certainly true, for the logical next steps would have to tackle communism versus social democracy, the reformist ideas of Maynard Keynes and Galbraith, the historic dip in inequality that Thomas Piketty documented in ’Capital In The Twenty First Century’, and the fossil-fuelled climate crisis precipitated by rising Western affluence. At that point Williams would have left moral philosophy for active political economy.
Social democracy has become the first effective system for controlling inequality through regulation and progressive taxation, but has also brought unforeseen consequences: the downward spread of prosperity induces pleonexia among the electorate (though we now call it ‘consumerism’) accompanied by an aversion to paying taxes. This, and social democracy's failure to create transnational regulatory bodies, opens a loophole through which political reaction and pleonectic oligarchy have reversed the flow, a story still being written, to which Trump’s second term might prove the finale. Williams’ choice of end-point was perhaps wise, and the work he has produced is a valuable tool for progressives to continue the argument, if it does indeed continue.
Dick Pountain, London
