Book Launch and Discussion: A Brief History of Equality

Saeed Dehghani: In his book A Brief History of Equality, Thomas Piketty presents a narrative of history that is optimistic—a narrative suggesting that, despite numerous setbacks, civilization is moving toward social, economic, and political equality in the long run. The metrics Piketty uses for quantitative measurement are mortality, literacy, and political and economic advancement from around 1820 to the twenty-first century. Life expectancy at birth worldwide has risen from twenty-six years to seventy-two years. With the expansion of compulsory public education, the literacy rate has increased from about ten percent to eighty-five percent. Slavery has been legally abolished worldwide, with few exceptions. Colonial empires have disintegrated. The right to vote has expanded dramatically. A middle class, which was virtually non-existent for most of the periods under discussion, has now emerged as the largest socio-economic group. Although this historical canvas is broad and extensive, Piketty's main focus is on analyzing the egalitarian steps taken in the twentieth century. The "Great Redistribution" of wealth between 1914 and 1980 largely benefited the middle class. However, in the twenty-first century, on the one hand, the concentration of wealth is declining, and on the other, inequalities have become so high and so intolerable in many respects that they are difficult to justify. Piketty enumerates three remedies for the current situation: 1. the growth of welfare states, 2. an increase in income and wealth taxes, and 3. the dissolution of foreign and colonial assets. He primarily focuses on the first two, arguing that both have been grappling with constraints in the era of neoliberalism after 1980. Therefore, throughout the book, he seeks to argue that the expansion of the welfare state's power and the gradual increase in taxation must continue for equality to grow meaningfully.

Toward the end of the book, he writes about the "need to regain control over capitalism." But can the reins of the unruly horse of capitalism be seized so easily? Is this egalitarian vision achievable with the tools Piketty proposes? Piketty knows that "today, the resistance of the aristocracy is an unavoidable reality," but he argues that "breaking this resistance is only possible through powerful collective mobilization in times of crisis and tension."

Piketty's most likely defense is to remind readers of what he assesses as the achievements of the great redistribution, achievements that were only won at the cost of the elites' loss of power and wealth. It is commonly claimed that public education, affordable healthcare, maternity leave, social security, unemployment insurance, the reduction of the working day, and other changes in working and domestic conditions were only achieved because of the efforts of radical social movements to wrest certain rights and benefits from the elites. Piketty overlooks the possibility that the victories of the twentieth century did not stem solely from the persistent work of progressivism. The chaos and devastation that occurred on a global scale through two world wars, famine, disease, and imperialism were equally important. The boom that emerged after the Second World War, in the shadow of the welfare states favored by Piketty, required a crisis that wasted millions of lives and billions of dollars in capital.

One of the strengths of his book is that he does not consider social relations, and consequently the political institutions from which they originate, to be immutable. He tells us that "human societies constantly invent rules and institutions to construct their structure and divide wealth and power, but political choices are always reversible." Yet, are the changes Piketty proposes desirable?

The aim of this book is to show that, since the end of the eighteenth century, Western European societies (and later their heirs) experienced a massive increase in equality, which peaked in the middle decades of the twentieth century. This was made possible by the ever-widening expansion of several institutional arrangements, such as access to voting rights, parliamentary democracy, and freedom of the press, and a social pact based on highly progressive tax systems and the universalization of compulsory education, health insurance, and labor law—in short, the welfare state. The main point here is that inequality, even in its economic dimension, was curbed as a result of a highly political process. Based on these premises, the book's goal is to raise awareness of the merits of that social pact and to mobilize individuals and social groups to fight for policies that increase equality, especially the tools that were so effective just a few decades ago, namely progressive taxation and the welfare state.

Piketty shows that imperialism, colonialism, and slavery are fundamental to understanding the dynamics of international and domestic inequality, and the obstacles on the path to increasing equality. For example, in a chapter on "the question of reparations," he addresses how, when France finally recognized Haiti's independence in 1825, the latter was forced to pay compensation equivalent to 150 million gold francs—or 300 percent of Haiti's national income in 1825—to former slaveholders. This debt officially ended in the early 1950s.

At the same time, the national welfare state was limited to the countries of the Global North in the decades from the 1950s to the 1980s, and after thirty years of financial and commercial globalization, its replication elsewhere is impossible. As Piketty writes, the hyper-globalization that took off in the 1980s "has contributed to the permanent weakening of the fragile process of building a legal state and state power in the Global South." In his view, the solution, as well as the "real alternative" to China's authoritarian state capitalism, is "democratic, participatory, and federalist socialism, ecological and multicultural." This is the logical endpoint of a long-standing egalitarian movement that has been underway since the end of the eighteenth century."

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