Abstract
Savage sets himself two goals in this book. First, he wants to write a text which is accessible to a wide audience. In this he succeeds: the book is free of jargon and lengthy statistics, and uses easily intelligible graphs and tables to add visual narratives to the text. Although he wants us to read the book from cover to cover (which author doesn’t?), he provides excellent summaries at the end of each chapter which, together with the introduction, can provide a useful first overview of the book’s arguments.
Second, Savage wants to correct two shortcomings of past studies of inequality. He takes as his examples Piketty’s work, citing his graph of the share of the top 10% in US national income between 1910 and 2010, and Bourdieu’s work on the cultural and interactive nuances of lived inequality reflected in the different lifestyles, tastes, and spending habits across the inequality structure in 1960s France. Savage’s disagreement is not with the substance of these studies; in fact, he refers to them throughout the book. Instead, he faults them for what they miss. In his view, Piketty’s Capital in the 21 Century disentangles the historical evolution of inequality structures but tells us little about how these changes were experienced by rich and poor participants. Bourdieu’s view of inequality, on the other hand, depicts ‘the phenomenological world of feeling, intensity and passion of inequality’ (Savage, 2021: 72), but only as a snapshot of a particular time and place. Inequality becomes a field where competing players use economic and social resources to further their position and ‘endlessly reproduce themselves as one vanguard replaces another’ (Savage, 2021: 88).
Savage combines these two perspectives in a fluid historical framework which shows how cultural and experiential sides of inequality interact with shifts in distributional inequality over time. An obvious starting point is Marx’s analysis of the accumulation of capital. This process involves both change and continuity. Bourgeois society constantly revamps itself and rejects its past, but integrates at the same time elements of previous social formations. The past is not just a residual relic which has no agency. The study of inequality must therefore recognize the ‘importance of duration’ (Savage, 2021: 103).
There remains, however, a problem. Marx, like many social scientists before and after him, saw history as a process of progressive advancement. This view became a common theme of theories of modernity and inspired liberal and neo-liberal theories to see inequality as an essential condition for societal prosperity. What they overlooked was that capital accumulation frequently led to entropic processes: economic crises, environmental damage, or false information spread by social media. The inverse relationship between income inequality and a variety of social problems illustrated in Wilkinson’s and Pickett’s Spirit Level showed the need to include entropic outcomes in the study of inequality, although their findings used only US and European data.
With these considerations in place, Savage divides the history of capitalist inequality into three phases: the classical imperial inequality of the nineteenth century, the emergence of nation spaces in the twentieth century, and the recent return of a new global imperial system. Classical imperial inequality was marked by a wealthy industrial elite in Europe which saw their social position as normal and natural, although it was no longer legitimated by birth but by economic success. They distinguished themselves from others by criteria of respectability and civility, and divided the large majority of the poorer population into those who could or could not be trusted. Class differences were static and impermeable and endured in England well into the twentieth century.
During the second phase, nineteenth-century empires gave way to an increasing importance of nation states. Earlier categorical social divisions became more probabilistic and open as capitalism required a more flexible work force. Inequality was now portrayed as a system of unequal chances, identified by new statistical tools for measuring social positions and mobility, and reflected in the increasing use of words like social capital, meritocracy, and career in social science literature. Politically, this phase was characterized by the emergence of national democracies which stabilized for a time around institutionalized rules of the game, redistributive social policies, and a national consensus on shared goals.
Savage’s third phase, the rise of a new imperial inequality with an increasingly global reach, began toward the end of the twentieth century. Here as in earlier times past social and political structures partially reappeared. While the previous phase was characterized by high civic engagements and led to significant improvements in wages and incomes, especially for women and previously discriminated groups, these gains produced the paradoxical result of making the differences between these groups and those above them more visible and frustrating. Visceral, experienced inequality among women, racial minorities, or disadvantaged classes became ‘more intense and . . . more grating’ (Savage, 2021: 219). As a result new divisions emerged. A global elite, wealthier than ever, controlled multinational financial empires and lived in privileged urban areas and tax havens across the world. Democratic institutions were dominated by insiders, often connected to elites, leading to the ‘corporate take-over of the neoliberal state’ (Savage, 2021: 306). At the same time electoral engagement declined. Collective visions of change dissolved into competing interest groups and ‘visceral politics’ of resentment and anger directed at ‘old white males’, the main beneficiaries of wealth.
In the last chapter of the book (‘What Is to Be Done?’), Savage develops a political agenda for reversing the trend toward a new imperial inequality. It must achieve reform while avoiding a state-controlled socialism. Reducing relative inequalities between groups or nations is not enough. Instead, a pragmatic radicalism must pry power away from elites. The neoliberal model of unlimited economic growth must be replaced by ‘a more balanced and rounded debate about what we value’ and the resources necessary to journey through ‘the good life’ (Savage, 2021: 318, 323). Capital should be held to account by revealing its use by the rich for accumulation, consumption, and political influence. A shift in wealth should be achieved through more progressive taxation, a 1% tax on wealth and a cautious inheritance tax which allows ‘ordinary’ households to pass on their estate. Expropriation directed at specific groups should be based on the social value of assets and be subject to ‘public stewardship’ (Savage, 2021: 320). Finally, Savage suggests that these goal can best be achieved in a framework of ‘sustainable nationalism’ which prevents wealthy individuals from accumulating and moving their assets across national boundaries.
These suggestions are interesting but may also strike readers as rather vague and short on specifics. Many of Savage’s proposals have been thoroughly explored. Through the investigative work of nongovernmental organizations or the major leaks of bank data on international tax avoidance, we know more than ever about the financial maneuvers of the new imperial elite. The same is the case for environmental sustainability, a topic rarely mentioned in the book, but a classic example for the gap between what is possible and what capitalism allows, an experiential gap that Marx identified as one of the key conditions for fundamental change. The real question is why all this is widely known but has led to so little change.
Nonetheless, Savage’s book has many strengths. It focuses on the distribution of income and wealth which cuts across all other dimensions of inequality but has gotten lost in the preoccupation with gender and race which dominates current sociology curricula. It integrates structural and subjective dimensions of inequality and brings together a wide range of research on perceptions and responses to unequal social life. It also succeeds in demonstrating the emergence, transformation, and renewed impact of events and experiences over time, although this is not always convincing. I think Piketty’s assessment of identity politics as a dead end describes their internal fissures and their divisive effects better than Savage’s interpretation of ‘visceral politics’ as potentially progressive voices. In reality, these politics have long become an integral tool in the ideological machinery which supports the new imperial order. As for the ‘old white males’, a trope that has become de rigueur in academic debates, the new imperial owners of mansions, yachts, and trophy wives hail from many corners of the world, from Nigeria to Europe, Russia to Saudi Arabia, Brazil to China. Overall, however, this is an important, readable, and rewarding book.