The Greatest of All Plagues:
How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato to Marx
By David Lay Williams
Princeton University Press, 424 pages, $35
Six years ago, Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now was a runaway bestseller. Though stuffed with references to figures like David Hume and Immanuel Kant, it was sold in airport bookstores along with the latest offerings from Bob Woodward and Stephen King. In a chapter on inequality, the Harvard psychologist described “the second decade of the 21st century” as a time when “economic inequality has become an obsession.” He cited Pope Francis, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump, all of whom seemed to assume in one way or another that rising inequality was a problem. Pinker was puzzled by this “obsession.” Perhaps, he speculated, these critics were mixing up inequality with some distinct concept like poverty.
If the rules of meritocratic competition are reasonably fair, and no one at the bottom is starving, wrote Pinker, what reason could there be but “spiteful envy” for caring if the gap between the top and the bottom is two to one or three to one or a million to one? Why should anyone mind if some people live in mansions, attended by small armies of servants, while others worry about how to pay the rent for their cramped apartments? So long as the best and brightest people who grow up in those apartments can make it to Harvard, and none of them ends up living under bridges, all is well with the world.
“It is, indeed, a plague.”
Commenting on this in his new book, The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx, David Lay Williams notes that it is “perhaps unsurprising” that “Bill Gates, one of the wealthiest men in the world,” championed Enlightenment Now as his “new favorite book of all time.” While future editions of The Greatest of All Plagues are unlikely to come with glowing quotes from the likes of Gates, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos, Williams’s book has several virtues. The first and most obvious is that it puts to rest the idea that concern about economic inequality is a peculiar obsession of our own century. As with Enlightenment Now, its subject matter falls within the standard Western canon of “great books.” There are chapters devoted to Plato, the New Testament, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. There are also substantial guest appearances by everyone from Plutarch and Thucydides to Aristotle to Alexis de Tocqueville to John Rawls. The reasons these figures worried about inequality sometimes overlapped and sometimes diverged—but they all saw it as a serious problem. Inequality, they all understood, isn’t the envious complaint of petty people. It is, indeed, a plague.
In 2018, I taught a class at Jilin University in China on Hume’s philosophy. One of my students started her final paper with a sentence that’s lingered in my head ever since. “David Hume was a bourgeois philosopher in the 18th century.” The assumption so casually embodied in that sentence is that every thinker is best understood, first and foremost, as a representative of a particular set of class interests, and seeing it made me wonder if, even as the People’s Republic becomes ever more capitalist and inegalitarian, a particularly simple way of understanding Karl Marx’s theory of history continues to be a major influence in its universities.
As it happens, I continue to think that a more sophisticated version of that theory is broadly correct (more on that, anon). What can’t be reasonably denied, though, is that thinkers situated in a variety of different social and historical contexts were fully capable of arriving at insights inconvenient to the people at the top of their societies—even if, as was often the case, they themselves sat near the top.
“Even Adam Smith … saw major drawbacks not just to poverty, but inequality.”
Even Adam Smith, the closest to Pinkerism of any of the thinkers who get their own chapter in The Greatest of All Plagues, saw major drawbacks not just to poverty, but inequality. The Scottish thinker worried, for example, that the accumulation of enormous fortunes distorted the moral fabric of society as a whole. Sounding almost like he could have been talking about the cult following of Musk, Smith observed:
The man of rank and distinction … is observed by all the world. Every body is eager to look at him, and to conceive, at least by sympathy, that joy and exultation with which his circumstances naturally inspire him. His actions are the objects of the public care. Scarce a word, scarce a gesture, can fall from him that is altogether neglected. In a great assembly, he is the person upon whom all direct their eyes; it is upon him that their passions seem all to wait with expectation, in order to receive that movement and direction which he shall impress upon them; and if his behaviour is not altogether absurd, he has, every moment, an opportunity of interesting mankind, and of rendering himself the object of the observation and fellow-feeling of every body about him.
Nor was this a minor complaint. Smith wrote that the “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful” is “the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” The flip side of this is the deep shame so often internalized by the poor—regardless of whether their poverty is absolute or “only” relative.
While Smith’s work on economics is far more widely remembered today than his moral philosophy, the latter is full of observations about problems about which the former points to no clear solution. He was too insightful a moral psychologist to imagine that a few stern lectures would cure the citizens of the disposition to hero-worship the holders of great fortunes in a commercial society. It’s simply easier to psychologically navigate a society of great inequality when we convince ourselves that every billionaire is a John Galt type, and that everyone working at McDonald’s belongs there. As Williams notes, Smith was also alive to the dangers that any sufficiently economically unequal society will generate legal codes “structured to benefit the rich and punish the poor systematically.”
What comes out most clearly here is the gap between Smith’s awareness of the problems and the solutions he was prepared to contemplate. Smith granted “a degree of progressive taxation and other modest measures” in his Wealth of Nations, Williams notes, but mainly he believed that “a growing economy and presumably growing wages” would cure poverty. In other words, Smith knew perfectly well that inequality and poverty are both crises, but his views on economic theory constricted his ability to imagine solutions to the first crisis.
Thousands of years earlier, Plato was far more willing to take extreme measures to alleviate inequality. In the Republic, Plato’s mouthpiece Socrates advises against letting the rulers of his ideal society own or even touch anything made of silver or gold: “They must not be under the same roof as these metals, wear them as jewelry, or drink from gold or silver goblets,” lest this inflame a corrupting lust for wealth. Plato’s spokesman in the Laws, the Athenian Stranger, goes even further, strictly limiting the wealth that can be accumulated even by private citizens. The Athenian Stranger suggests that the best laws for a new city would guarantee that no one would be allowed to accumulate more than four times as much wealth as the poorest citizen. Anyone suspecting a fellow citizen of exceeding this maximum could take them to court and have most of the offender’s wealth confiscated. Plato’s radicalism on this point shouldn’t be overstated. He regarded this as the best policy for cities that are starting from scratch. One of his chief motivations for opposing large-scale inequality in the first place was a desire for citizens to live in harmony with one another, bound by a sense of community. As Williams says, in “settled cities, already burdened by inequality,” Plato worried that “such measures would alienate and divide citizens more than they would harmonize them.” Under those circumstances, rulers should focus on “gradually and incrementally” persuading the wealthiest citizens to voluntarily give up most of their fortunes.
With the benefit of 23 additional centuries of hindsight, there may be excellent reasons to be skeptical that any such project of voluntary persuasion would ever be effective (here, Aristotle was the greater sage in underscoring the insufficiency of mere exhortation and the necessity of coercive laws). Nor do we have any examples of settled societies blessing economically egalitarian experiments when their citizens leave to settle new territories. The evidence would strongly suggest that, if more egalitarian outcomes can’t be achieved by means of political conflict, they simply can’t be achieved.
Still, Plato’s proposed limit on acceptable inequality is fascinating. He didn’t merely think that a good city should guarantee that the lower limit is set above absolute destitution. He objected to massive gaps.
Williams quotes the great libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek, who assailed socialist worries about economic inequality as a “sharp” break with “the whole evolution of Western civilization” from “the foundations laid by Christianity and the Greeks.” It’s not clear how Hayek would explain away the actual views of the most important thinker in ancient Greece. In our own society, wealthy shareholders and the CEOs of big corporations routinely have hundreds of times as much wealth as even unionized factory workers, never mind Uber drivers or fast-food workers. Plato, by contrast, worried about the insatiable greed that, as Socrates says in the Republic, “turns a man into a wolf,” immune to reason or appeals to the good of his fellow citizens. He worried that bonds of community become impossible given enormous divides in wealth. When some people in a city start to have five, six, or seven times as much as others, there are in practice two cities, “one for the rich and one for the poor.”
If Williams’s excavation of Plato’s views makes nonsense of one half of Hayek’s claim about “Christianity and the Greeks,” his chapter on the New Testament makes short work of the other. The textual evidence for an egalitarian Bible is clear—notwithstanding the efforts of prosperity-gospel preachers, GOP politicians who wear cross pins as they vote for tax cuts, and Catholic intellectuals who pretend that there is no daylight between the Catholic magisterium and Milton Friedman. The Christian scriptures are full of suspicion and distrust of the rich and exultation of the poor. Of course, both politically conservative Christians and distrustful socialists have often interpreted this aspect of Christian teaching in a way that deprives it of any this-worldly political import. Think of Marx’s line about the “opiate of the people,” or the radical labor unionist and songwriter Joe Hill, who mocked empty promises to hungry people that they’ll have “pie in the sky when [they] die.” Williams surely wouldn’t deny that the charge fits the attitudes of many Christians over the centuries. He’s skeptical, though, that a sharp line can be drawn between the temporal and eternal aspects of Jesus’s concern for the poor. He plays up passages in the New Testament praising the Old Testament law of Jubilee, which had long since stopped being enforced by Jesus’s time but which had mandated considerable redistribution of property every 49 years.
While Williams doesn’t emphasize this point, there is also the pesky fact that one of the few crystal-clear political teachings in the New Testament is that people should pay their taxes. I’m not a believer and wasn’t raised as one, so perhaps I’m missing something, but I’ve never understood how professed Christians can read Jesus exhorting his followers to cheerfully render unto Caesar, even when those taxes are being used to pay for occupying legions, and then turn around and complain about being taxed to pay for a welfare state to feed and clothe the poor.
That attention to the grievances of the poor would feature (albeit in very different forms) in Plato, Marx, Rosseau, and the New Testament shouldn’t surprise anyone. Williams’s chapter on Hobbes, though, might be a surprise to many readers who thought they were generally familiar with his views. It may seem absurd—and in certain respects, it may even be absurd—to call Hobbes an egalitarian. He was certainly very far from advocating political equality. Infamously, he demanded obedience to kings, emperors, and other such authority figures capable of keeping the “state of nature” at bay. But the same underlying concern about civil strife led him to be worried about the dangers that come with both excessive poverty and excessive wealth, and especially the two in combination. Nor can Hobbes’s concern about these matters be reduced to a pragmatic call for tossing some bread rations to the plebs so they don’t start revolutions. When excessive inequality leads to civil conflict, Hobbes faulted the rich. Surprisingly, he even endorsed Thomas Aquinas’s view that the natural law permits the poor to steal from the rich in cases of necessity.
“Philosophers, like non-philosophers, are capable of noticing uncomfortable things.”
All of this should be more than enough to refute, on the one hand, figures like Pinker and Hayek who see economic inequality as an “obsession” of recent vintage, incompatible with the Western canon and, on the other, the vulgar form of Marxism that expects every philosopher (except perhaps for a few tribunes of the oppressed classes) to have economic views that simply reflect the prevailing order. Philosophers, like non-philosophers, are capable of noticing uncomfortable things about their societies and processing those insights in their own ways. The resulting packages of views aren’t always easy to categorize, and overlap can be found in surprising places. Williams is surely right, for example, to notice the similarity between Marx’s observation that the imperatives of market competition endow capitalists with a “werewolf-like” hunger to accumulate profits at the expense of the working class and Plato’s concern that an insatiable appetite for riches “turns a man into a wolf.”
That said, it would be a mistake to bend the stick too far in the opposite direction from Pinker or my Chinese student, treating the concerns about economic inequality that pop up in so many places throughout the canon as basically uniform. These thinkers were starkly different from one another, not just in their views on other matters, but in how they thought about economic inequality.
Plato, for example, was deeply concerned about the dangers of excessive inequality between citizens, but it never seems to have occurred to him to fold ancient Greece’s massive class of slave laborers into his sphere of egalitarian concern. And if he, Hobbes, and Smith worried about the distribution of wealth, they were far less concerned than later thinkers like Rosseau, Mill, and Marx about deeper inequalities built into the economic structures by which wealth was generated. They certainly didn’t see class conflict as a vehicle for achieving greater equality, instead simply seeing it as a particularly worrying source of social strife to be headed off at the pass by wise rulers passing good laws.
Is it a coincidence that Marx came closest to being anticipated on these questions by the thinkers closest to him in time, namely, Rousseau and Mill? Williams quotes many places where Mill, for example, wrote of the ways working people are degraded by subordination to the power of employers on the job, and where he expressed the hope that more egalitarian state policies and the development of worker cooperatives in the private sector could combine to push society in a more positive direction. This wasn’t quite Marx’s socialism, but the two thinkers have a lot more than nothing in common. While they were contemporaries, I know of no evidence that either influenced the economic views of the other. In Marx’s masterpiece Capital, he trashed Mill as just another bourgeois apologist. (Mill’s socialistic evolution came later.) Nor does Mill seem to have been aware of the existence of Marx’s critique. Rather, to the extent that they converged, this seems to have been a result of them noticing similar things about the societies evolving around them. And a more sophisticated reading of Marx’s theory of history can help us make sense of both the intellectual and sociological layers of that story.
The most canonical statement of that theory comes in Marx’s 1859 preface to his Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. There, he argued that the “real foundation” (or “base”) of a society is its relations of production. In other words, if you want to understand the collective life of a society, you need to start by asking how most of its inhabitants spend their days, and how all of its inhabitants feed themselves. Who grows the grain? If it’s industrially processed afterwards, who does that? What Marxism emphasizes, in any given case, is whether what the “immediate producers” are related to the people calling the shots as serfs and lords, as slaves and owners, or as capitalists and proletarians.
“Marx made at least two important claims about history.”
In the 1859 preface, Marx made at least two important claims about history. The first is that this economic base gives rise to a “legal and political superstructure”—a structure of laws and governance, built on top of it, which serves to stabilize it.
The second is that the production relations are themselves downstream from the level of development of the forces of production. Ancient Athens, for example, couldn’t have achieved capitalist social relations if only Plato and Aristotle had preached the doctrines of Adam Smith, or socialist relations if only they had anticipated the insights of Marx. Ancient Greek society rested on the labor of slaves because the feeble development of its productive capacities provided no way to support a leisure class to drink wine, philosophize, and engage in democratic deliberation without forcing others to work for them through direct violence. Something broadly similar was true about feudalism. Modern industrial capitalism, on the other hand, rests on the labor of proletarians who are, as Marx says in Capital, “doubly free”—legally free to move around and make employment contracts with any capitalist who will have them and “free” from any way of supporting themselves that doesn’t involve submitting to the domination of a boss. (Rosseau anticipated something of this picture in a quote Williams mentions several times, where the Genevan philosopher counseled that economic inequality be kept within narrow enough bounds that “no citizen be so very rich that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is compelled to sell himself.”) Capitalism was able to displace these earlier systems precisely because it was so much better at developing the forces of production, and this, in turn, creates the possibility of marrying equality to material abundance in a socialist future.
Williams observes at one point that, of the thinkers who came before Marx, Plato was “perhaps the closest to entertaining the beneficial effects of radical change,” given the way his Athenian Stranger “speculates about a great flood wiping out most of civilization, along with its stores of gold and silver, imparting survivors with ‘the most well-bred dispositions,’ burdened by ‘neither wealth nor poverty.’” But I wish Williams would linger on this connection long enough to see the profound difference between Plato’s fantasy of a great flood and Marx’s hope for great social transformation resulting from class struggle. The flood allows people to start from scratch, so that, for example, every city can be founded according to the kind of strict rules that allow citizens to be taken to court for accumulating too much wealth. But one of the deepest differences between Marxism and earlier forms of socialist thought is precisely that Marx didn’t wish to start from scratch.
For all his moral disgust at the realities of capitalism, Marx very definitely didn’t see capitalism as an avoidable historical mistake. Rather, he believed that capitalism lays down the foundations for a more democratic and egalitarian economic order to come. Marx didn’t fantasize about a flood to destroy the steam engines and mechanized factories that created a kind of abundance hitherto unknown to human history. He wanted the engines to be collectively owned so that everyone could benefit from the fruits of their common labor.
Another claim in the 1859 preface, ambiguously related to the first one about base and superstructure, is that “social being” in some sense gives rise to “social consciousness.” Marx didn’t speak of an “ideological superstructure” like some later Marxists did (he only identifies a “legal and political” superstructure), but several of his formulations suggest that he thought “social consciousness,” too, is to some degree superstructural. The most sophisticated interpretation and defense of Marx’s views on these matters is the Canadian philosopher G.A. Cohen’s deep and rigorous study Karl Marx’s Theory of History. Cohen trod lightly on the question of the degree to which we should expect ideas to be shaped by prevailing modes of production.
Charitably, we might postulate that Marx didn’t see the views of various historical philosophers as being straightforwardly determined by class interests. Rather, he saw basic economic facts about their societies as helping to set the parameters within which they theorized. In Capital, for example, Marx frequently praised Aristotle as “the greatest thinker in antiquity,” but he speculated that the Stagirite was psychologically incapable of seeing slaves as people like everyone else, whose capacities for manual or intellectual labor were no different than anyone else’s. (This is how he explained Aristotle’s inability to “decipher” the secret of prices as expressions of an underlying “value” best explained in terms of universal human labor.) Similarly, the baleful effects of inequality in fortunes might have been obvious to all who looked around them for much of human history, but it may have been difficult to conceptualize replacing hierarchical relations of production with collective ownership and democratic control, even as a flight of fancy, if you lived in a society where even basic countervailing institutions of social power like labor unions still lay in the distant future.
“Whether we can achieve Marx’s vision … is an open question.”
Exactly how much truth there is in Marx’s historical materialism is, of course, extremely debatable. Many critics assume that the fall of the Soviet Union proved the folly of the whole picture, even though, as Cohen pointed out in an appendix to Karl Marx’s Theory of History, a flourishing socialism growing up in the underdeveloped soil of a backward and semi-feudal society like the one the Bolsheviks inherited in 1917 would itself have actually refuted Marx’s theory. A more credible concern is that there is simply no way to do without capital and labor markets without reproducing deep economic dysfunction. I’m at least cautiously optimistic on that front, but I can acknowledge that after the failures of the 20th century, there’s an enormous amount of room for reasonable and well-intentioned people to be skeptical. Whether we can achieve Marx’s vision—thus fulfilling Rousseau’s hope for a future in which no one is so asset-rich that they’re able to buy others or so asset-deprived that they’re willing to sell themselves—is an open question. Perhaps more modest and social-democratic ways of eroding the extent of inequality will turn out to be the end point of possible progress.
Williams doesn’t himself enter that debate in The Greatest of All Plagues. His agenda is far more modest. He wants to show that economic inequality isn’t some peculiar fixation of the 21st century that can be easily dismissed by those who fancy themselves defenders of the Western canon. And in that, he succeeds magnificently.