The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past

Inequalities once thought vanquished have returned with a vengeance, according to this dense academic study. Savage (Social Class in the 21st Century), a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, offers a wide-ranging survey of the contemporary debate about inequality, citing economist Thomas Piketty on inequalities of wealth and income, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on “fields” of cultural associations, Marx on capital as dead labor vampirizing living labor, and present-day protest movements on the “visceral” alienation caused by residual racism and patriarchy. Savage’s grand, though somewhat strained, take is that resurgent inequality reveals the “weight of history,” as the sins of colonialism, slavery, patriarchy, and capitalist exploitation nascent in early-modern European empires continue to overshadow the current age of ostensible equality. Savage’s treatise is more about sociological theories of inequality than inequality itself, and is couched in arcane abstractions—“[a]ny attempt to carve out the ‘present’ as differentiated from past and future, which is inherent in conceptions of modernity, is premised on an unsustainable temporal ontology”—that only a professor can love. Meanwhile, the sole policy recommendations are vague calls for higher taxes on the rich. This is an erudite yet murky treatment of a pressing issue. Photos. (May)