Williams’ book takes its title from Plato, who characterized economic inequality as fostering “the greatest of all evils” in his last work, Economic Inequality. Laws. Williams notes that our modern world is rife with extreme inequality. Since 1976, “the poorest 50 percent of Americans have seen their wealth increase by an average of $12,000 per household – barely enough to cover a single major medical crisis without insurance, or well under a year of college tuition.” “. On the other hand, the neoliberal era was a very good time to be rich. Those “in the richest 10% saw their wealth increase by nearly $3 million” and the “richest 1% saw their wealth increase by $16 million.” The richest 0.1 percent saw their net wealth increase by $85 million. And those in the top 0.01 percent saw their net wealth increase by $440 million per household.

Beyond creating staggering economic disparities between American households (not to mention the disparities between the richest Americans and the rest of the world), this has real political consequences. Even conservative political scientists like Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin have observed This resentment toward economic elites has generated a widespread perception that democratically elected leaders do not serve the interests of normal people. And social scientists, including Martin Gilens and Thomas Piketty have demonstrated that it is not just about perceptions: the ultra-rich enjoy enormous political influence compared to ordinary people.

The welcome contribution of Williams’ book is to show that many of the great thinkers in the Western philosophical canon would not have been surprised by this development. This reverses the common conservative argument that arguing against economic inequality is somehow contrary to the direction of classical Western thought. Rather, it is the casual and lazy dismissal of concerns about economic inequality that constitutes an intellectual deviation and decline from the norm.

Williams notes that Plato, in the Lawsdefined “inequality as a central problem of politics”. Plato warned that inequality would reinforce “vice” and “undermine civic friendship and harmony” within the polis. He proposed that inequality should be “tightly limited” and that the richest should have “no more than four times the property of the poorest citizens”. In the New Testament, Jesus also continually emphasized the moral dangers of excess wealth, famously insisting in the Gospel of Matthew that “it will be difficult for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of the Heavens.” And St. Paul warned that greed “obscures the imperative to love and care for our neighbor.”

Millennia later, Hobbes – a thinker who broke with Christianity and Platonism on many points – also expressed deep reservations about inequality. He was particularly concerned about the destabilizing political implications of extreme concentrations of wealth. Hobbes advises a prudent ruler to redistribute wealth as necessary to avoid instability caused by the plutocratic ambition of the rich or the envy and resentment of the poor. Ironically, Williams’s reading of Hobbes suggests that conservative admirers like Michael Oakeshott missed one of his main recommendations. If Hobbes is right, economic inequality could be an obstacle to achieving the law and order that conservatives so ardently claim to defend.

Contemporary readers will likely be more familiar with the later thinkers discussed in Williams’ book, who are better known as commentators on inequality. It is unlikely that Rousseau, Mill and Marx had egalitarian sympathies – although how Marxism conceives of equality is a matter of debate. More novel is Williams’ important contribution to the rise literature on Adam Smith which shows that he was anything but a naive supporter of capitalism. In The wealth of nationshe expressed deep concern about how capitalists treated labor, noting that the “masters” would form a “tacit but constant and uniform combination not to raise the wages of labor above their real rates.” Smith anticipated Marx in worrying that the division of labor could distort individuals by not allowing them to develop different abilities and aspects of their personality – instead imposing hyper-specialization and repetition of the same boring task over and over again. He recommended that the state intervene to resolve this problem by providing educational and cultural opportunities to the poor.

Beyond economics, Smith believed that inequality was corrosive to the morality of society as a whole. The very wealthy were allowed to indulge in all sorts of vices and were “generally treated with great indulgence and are easily excused or pardoned altogether.” On the other hand, “the vices of levity are always ruinous for the people, and a single week of carelessness and dissipation is often enough to destroy a poor worker forever and push him into despair after having committed enormous crimes.” Indeed, for Smith, the admiration of the rich was THE most corrupting influence on the morals of society:

This disposition to admire, and almost to adore, the rich and powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect people of poor and mean circumstances. . . It is at the same time the greatest and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that contempt, of which vice and madness are the only appropriate objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of the moralists of all times.

The greatest of all scourges is clearly written and demonstrates beyond doubt that concerns about economic inequality run the gamut among Western thinkers. Yet Williams does not devote enough time to the important history of socialist thought on this issue.

The book contains large chapters on Mill and Marx expressing admiration for their (very different) visions of a socialist future. But stopping the book there means that a long line of important authors, lesser known to the general public, never get their moment in the sun. This is not a problem unique to Williams. In his recent work Hijackedpolitical philosopher Elizabeth Anderson gently punished political philosophy for largely ignoring the long history of democratic socialist and social democratic thought. She writes that “in the history of political thought, no social democrat has been canonized, despite the enormous influence of social democracy in many wealthy capitalist democracies.”

Anderson’s claim may be somewhat exaggerated: many leftists can rattle off a long list of important socialist and social democratic thinkers. But she is right that the list would not be as well known to the general public as, say, the “canon” of conservative authors which has been well known. popularized. This is of course not for lack of worthy and diverse socialist and social democratic candidates: Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, RH Tawney, Leonard Hobhouse, Simone de Beauvoir, Ernst Wigforss, Rudolf Meidner, Michael Harrington, Martin Luther King, Paul Tillich and Angela Davis, to name a few, come to mind.

Given the obvious need to reintroduce socialist thinkers to English-speaking readers, it is a shame that Williams did not devote much time to them, if at all. This is largely because, as Anderson notes, social democrats and democratic socialists have done more than just think about economic inequality. They have actively and often successfully sought to challenge it in practice. Such models are extremely useful in contemporary times where, as Williams observes, the need to address economic inequality is particularly urgent.

Despite this shortcoming, The greatest of all scourges often makes for invigorating reading. He manages to take numbers that many of us might think we know and show us that we didn’t know them very well at all. Williams shows that economic inequality is not only the greatest of all evils, but also one of the most enduring, so much so that many of the most influential thinkers of many eras have felt called to condemn it.