Thomas Piketty Draws Lessons from the History of Equality
392
The history of equality is a history of violence and social struggle, punctuated by regression and disaster.
Source:
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674273559
Thomas Piketty, the French economist who has made a name for himself studying inequality, recently republished a new book, A Brief History of Equality. This time he turns to the study of equality and highlights the long-term trend of human societies toward equality since the 18th century. A Brief History of Equality condenses the 3,000 pages of his three previous books (each a thousand pages long) - Top Incomes in France in the 20th Century, Capital in the 21st Century and Capital and Ideology - to 250 pages. It is a route into Piketty's arguments in his earlier books, with their luxuriantly extensive data and historical detail.
Here is an edited excerpt from A Brief History of Equality.
This book offers a comparative history of inequalities among social classes in human societies. Or rather, it offers a history of equality, because, as we shall see, there has been a long-term movement over the course of history toward more social, economic, and political equality.
This is not, of course, a peaceful history, and still less a linear one. Revolts and revolutions, social struggles and crises of all kinds play a central role in the history of equality reviewed here. This history is also punctuated by multiple phases of regression and identitarian introversion.
Nonetheless, at least since the end of the eighteenth century there has been a historical movement toward equality. The world of the early 2020s, no matter how unjust it may seem, is more egalitarian than that of 1950 or that of 1900, which were themselves in many respects more egalitarian than those of 1850 or 1780.
The precise developments vary depending on the period, and on whether we are studying inequalities between social classes defined by legal status, ownership of the means of production, income, education, national or ethno-racial origin—all dimensions that will interest us here.
But over the long term, no matter which criterion we employ, we arrive at the same conclusion. Between 1780 and 2020, we see developments tending toward greater equality of status, property, income, genders, and races within most regions and societies on the planet, and to a certain extent when we compare these societies on the global scale.
Worldwide life expectancy at birth has risen from about twenty-six years on average in 1820 to seventy-two years in 2020. The literacy rate in the world population aged fifteen or more has risen from 12 percent to 85 percent.
The world population and the average income per person increased more than ten- fold between 1700 and 2020: the former rose from about 600 million in 1700 to more than 7 billion in 2020; the latter, expressed in 2020 euros and in purchasing power parity, rose from scarcely 80 euros per month per person in 1700 to about 1,000 euros per month in 2020. That corresponds in both cases to an average growth of about 0.8 percent per year, accumulated over 320 years.
If we adopt a global, multidimensional perspective on inequalities, we can see that, in several respects, this advance toward equality has also continued during the period from 1980 to 2020, which is more complex and mixed than is often thought.
Since the end of the eighteenth century, there has been a real, long-term tendency toward equality, but it is nonetheless limited in scope. We shall see that different inequalities have persisted at considerable and unjustified levels on all these dimensions—status, property, power, income, gender, origin, and so on—and, moreover, that individuals often face inequalities in combination. To assert that there is a tendency toward equality is not to brag about success. Instead, it is to call for continuing the fight on a solid, historical basis.
By examining how movement toward equality has actually been produced, we can learn precious lessons for our future and better understand the struggles and mobilizations that have made this movement possible, as well as the institutional structures and legal, social, fiscal, educational, and electoral systems that have allowed equality to become a lasting reality. Unfortunately, this process of collective learning about equitable institutions is often weakened by historical amnesia, intellectual nationalism, and the compartmentalization of knowledge. In order to continue the advance toward equality, we must return to the lessons of history and transcend national and disciplinary borders.
What are the main lessons that can be drawn from this new economic and social history of equality?
The most obvious is no doubt the following: inequality is first of all a social, historical, and political construction. In other words, for the same level of economic or technological development, there are always many different ways of organizing a property system or a border system, a social and political system or a fiscal and educational system. These options are political in nature.
They depend on the state of power relationships between the various social groups and the worldviews involved, and they lead to inegalitarian levels and structures that are extremely variable, depending on societies and periods. All creations of wealth in history have issued from a collective process: they depend on the international division of labor, the use of worldwide natural resources, and the accumulation of knowledge since the beginnings of humanity. Human societies constantly invent rules and institutions in order to structure themselves and to divide up wealth and power, but always on the basis of reversible political choices.
The second lesson is that since the end of the eighteenth century there has been a long-term movement toward equality. This is the consequence of conflicts and revolts against injustice that have made it possible to transform power relationships and overthrow institutions supported by the dominant classes, which seek to structure social inequality in a way that benefits them, and to replace them with new institutions and new social, economic, and political rules that are more equitable and emancipatory for the majority.
It was the peasant revolts of 1788–1789 and the events of the French Revolution that led to the abolition of the nobility's privileges. Similarly, it was not muted discussions in Paris salons but the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue in 1791 that led to the beginning of the end of the Atlantic slavery system.
The total number of slaves on Euro-American plantations in the Atlantic sphere reached 6 million in 1860 (including 4 million in the southern United States, 1.6 million in Brazil, and 0.4 million in Cuba). Slavery in the French and British West Indies (to which I have added Mauritius, La Réunion, and the Cape Colony) reached its apogee around 1780–1790 (1.3 million), then declined following the revolt in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and the abolitions of 1833 and 1848. Slavery and colonialism, once endemic, have been substantially abolished.
In the course of the twentieth century, social and trade-union mobilizations played a major role in the establishment of new power relationships between capital and labor and in the reduction of inequalities. The two world wars can also be analyzed as the consequence of social tensions and contradictions connected with the intolerable inequality that prevailed before 1914, both domestically and internationally. In the United States, it took a devastating civil war to put an end to the slavery system in 1865. A century later, in 1965, the Civil Rights movement succeeded in abolishing the system of legal racial discrimination. Examples are many: in the 1950s and 1960s the wars of independence played a central role in ending European colonialism; it took decades of riots and mobilizations to do away with South African apartheid in 1994, and so on.
In addition to revolutions, wars, and revolts, economic and financial crises often serve as turning points where social conflicts are crystallized and power relationships are redefined. The crisis of the 1930s played a central part in the long-lasting delegitimation of economic liberalism and the justification of new forms of state intervention. More recently, the financial crisis of 2008 and the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic in 2020–2021 have already begun to overturn various certainties that shortly before had been considered irrefutable, certainties concerning, for example, the acceptable level of public debt or the role of central banks.
The end of history will not come tomorrow. The movement toward equality still has a long way to go, especially in a world in which the poorest, and particularly the poorest in the poorest countries, are preparing to be subjected, with increasing violence, to climatic and environmental damage caused by the richest people's way of life. The richest 1% on the planet emit more carbon than the poorest 50%. Nearly four billion people live in the countries that will be the first to suffer the consequences of the lifestyles of the richest.
It is also important to highlight another lesson issuing from history, namely that struggles and power relationships are not sufficient as such. They are a necessary condition for overturning inegalitarian institutions and established powers, but unfortunately they do not in any way guarantee that the new institutions and the new powers that will replace them will always be as egalitarian and emancipatory as we might have hoped.
The reason for this is simple. Although it is easy to denounce the inegalitarian or oppressive nature of established institutions and governments, it is much harder to agree on the alternative institutions that will make it possible to make real progress toward social, economic, and political equality, while at the same time respecting individual rights, including the right to be different. The task is not at all impossible, but it requires us to accept deliberation, the confrontation of differing points of view, compromises, and experimentation. Above all, it requires us to accept the fact that we can learn from the historical trajectories and experiences of others, and especially that the exact content of just institutions is not known a priori and is worth debating as such.
Concretely, we will see that since the end of the eighteenth century, the march toward equality has been based on the development of a number of specific institutional arrangements that have to be studied as such: equality before the law; universal suffrage and parliamentary democracy; free and obligatory education; universal health insurance; progressive taxes on income, inheritance, and property; joint management and labor law; freedom of the press; international law; and so on.
However, each of these arrangements, far from having reached a complete and consensual form, is connected with a precarious, unstable, and temporary compromise, in perpetual redefinition and emerging from specific social conflicts and mobilizations, interrupted bifurcations, and particular historical moments. They all suffer from multiple insufficiencies and must be constantly rethought, supplemented, and replaced by others. As it currently exists almost everywhere, formal equality before the law does not exclude profound discriminations based on origins or gender; representative democracy is only one of the imperfect forms of participation in politics; inequalities of access to education and health care remain extremely intractable; progressive taxes and redistribution of wealth must be completely reconceived on the domestic and international scale; power-sharing in business enterprises is still in its infancy; control of almost all the media by a few oligarchs can hardly be considered the most complete form of a free press; the international legal system, founded on the uncontrolled circulation of capital without any social or climatic objective, is usually related to a kind of neocolonialism that benefits the wealthiest people, and so on.
The battle for equality will continue in the twenty-first century, basing itself chiefly on the memory of past struggles. To keep moving, we need to learn and commit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make equality a lasting reality. At the same time, we need to resist historical amnesia and the temptations of cultural separatism and intellectual compartmentalization.
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