Review of The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato to Marx by David Lay Williams (Princeton University Press, 2024)
You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.
We shouldn’t care about economic inequality. And if we do care about economic inequality and try to fix it, that will only provoke trouble.
That has been a long-standing refrain of many a politician and intellectual. Milton Friedman famously remarked that a society that “puts equality before freedom will get neither.” Philosophers like Harry Frankfurt cautioned against a zeal for equality per se, insisting that what really matters is the absolute welfare of the poor rather than their relative level of wealth. Margaret Thatcher accused the Left of being content to have the poor be poorer so long as the rich were as well. And American conservatives have charged centrist politicians from Barack Obama to Kamala Harris with embracing “class warfare” and “Marxism” for proposing even milquetoast economic reforms.
The arguments against caring about inequality vary in both substance and quality. But a very common one runs that concern with economic inequality is an intellectual aberration — stoked, as William Buckley put it, by “ever so busy egalitarians” who agitate the lower orders with anti-Western ideas. This sentiment is carefully challenged by David Lay Williams in his new book, The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato…
Auteur: Matt McManus
