The politics of inequality: A political history of the idea of economic inequality in America

The present work charts the devolution of the discourse on economic inequality in American thought and is an attempt to discern the political course of these ideas. The thesis is that the discourse against economic inequality in American political thought has eroded slowly over the course of American politics. Whereas economic inequality was intensely critiqued in the beginning decades of American political and social thought---as capitalism developed and began to create modern economic life as well as rigid social divisions---its radicalism and intensity began to wane once a liberal-capitalist consensus was established during the New Deal era. Contemporary ideas about inequality largely lack an inspiration toward radicalism not simply because of a strong sense of American liberal ideology, but also because the nature of the economy and its effects have become largely de-politicized.; This work traces what I call America's economic "egalitarian tradition" which emphasized the importance of politics over that of economics, seeing that the new economic society that capitalism was creating in America was decidedly against the political impulses that created American political and social life. This anti-aristocratic discourse had a concrete referent in the way that wealth was monopolizing itself, recreating what many of the radical social critics of the early nineteenth-century referred to as a new feudalism.; But the late twentieth century would see the rise of a conservative assault on this egalitarian tradition. This would come in the form of liberal economic thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Their arguments in support of liberal individualism, the minimalism of the state and its absence in economic affairs, and the conflation of political liberty with economic liberty, meant a transformation of the discourse of inequality in America toward one which would de politicize economic inequality and would also begin to sow the seeds for a kind of legitimation of economic divisions based on the idea of liberal individualism. The American economic egalitarian tradition therefore becomes undermined by the radicalization of economic liberalism itself as well as a deepening culture of possessive individualism.