Inequality, authors of the left usually argue, is not inevitable. The gap between the rich and the poor was made by man and can be undone by man. But Walter Scheidel’s recent book on the subject, The Great Leveller, ends on a sobering note: “All of us who prize economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions, it was only ever brought forth in sorrow.”
In his 528-page study of inequality “from the Stone Age to the 21st century”, the Stanford historian finds that significant equalisation has only ever been achieved by what he calls the “Four Horsemen of Levelling”: mass warfare, violent revolution, state collapse and lethal pandemics. The two world wars, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, the fall of the Roman empire and the Black Death are among the most notable examples. Outside of such tumultuous upheavals, governments have struggled to constrain inequality.
When we spoke recently by phone, I asked Scheidel what inspired his epic undertaking. “Thomas Piketty reached further back into the past than people usually do [in his book Capital] and, for him, that was a couple of centuries,” the 51-year-old Austrian told me. “Since I primarily work on ancient history, I thought I should look at the full run of history. I discovered that no one had tried to do it before, which isn’t very surprising because you have to be so eclectic in your approach.”
In 1999, when Scheidel moved to the United States from Vienna, inequality was rarely discussed in the media or in academia. After the financial crisis, however, “It really flared up. There has been a significant shift.”
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