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The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past
A pioneering book that takes us beyond economic debate to show how inequality is returning us to a past dominated by empires, dynastic elites, and ethnic divisions.
The economic facts of inequality are clear. The rich have been pulling away from the rest of us for years, and the super-rich have been pulling away from the rich. More and more assets are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Mainstream economists say we need not worry; what matters is growth, not distribution. In The Return of Inequality , acclaimed sociologist Mike Savage pushes back, explaining inequality’s profound deleterious effects on the shape of societies.
Savage shows how economic inequality aggravates cultural, social, and political conflicts, challenging the coherence of liberal democratic nation-states. Put simply, severe inequality returns us to the past. By fracturing social bonds and harnessing the democratic process to the strategies of a resurgent aristocracy of the wealthy, inequality revives political conditions we thought we had moved empires and dynastic elites, explosive ethnic division, and metropolitan dominance that consigns all but a few cities to irrelevance. Inequality, in short, threatens to return us to the very history we have been trying to escape since the Age of Revolution.
Westerners have been slow to appreciate that inequality undermines the very foundations of liberal faith in progress and trust in the political community’s concern for all its members. Savage guides us through the ideas of leading theorists of inequality, including Marx, Bourdieu, and Piketty, revealing how inequality reimposes the burdens of the past. At once analytically rigorous and passionately argued, The Return of Inequality is a vital addition to one of our most important public debates.
The economic facts of inequality are clear. The rich have been pulling away from the rest of us for years, and the super-rich have been pulling away from the rich. More and more assets are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Mainstream economists say we need not worry; what matters is growth, not distribution. In The Return of Inequality , acclaimed sociologist Mike Savage pushes back, explaining inequality’s profound deleterious effects on the shape of societies.
Savage shows how economic inequality aggravates cultural, social, and political conflicts, challenging the coherence of liberal democratic nation-states. Put simply, severe inequality returns us to the past. By fracturing social bonds and harnessing the democratic process to the strategies of a resurgent aristocracy of the wealthy, inequality revives political conditions we thought we had moved empires and dynastic elites, explosive ethnic division, and metropolitan dominance that consigns all but a few cities to irrelevance. Inequality, in short, threatens to return us to the very history we have been trying to escape since the Age of Revolution.
Westerners have been slow to appreciate that inequality undermines the very foundations of liberal faith in progress and trust in the political community’s concern for all its members. Savage guides us through the ideas of leading theorists of inequality, including Marx, Bourdieu, and Piketty, revealing how inequality reimposes the burdens of the past. At once analytically rigorous and passionately argued, The Return of Inequality is a vital addition to one of our most important public debates.
448 pages, Hardcover
Published May 18, 2021
15 people are currently reading
347 people want to read
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Mike Savage
50 books14 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 1, 2022
Mike Savage is an interesting writer. This is the third of his books I’ve read, but the first that is focused on the theory of sociology, rather than on his research into social class more generally. He is responsible for the Great British Class Survey - basically applying Bourdieu’s ideas to class distinctions in the UK. An earlier book with him as a co-author looked at how distinction had shifted away from a narrow interest in high art, towards a more omnivore diet of a wide range of popular culture.
In this book he is looking at how social science has shifted its gaze over recent decades towards inequality. As he says at one point, the telescope has been turned and rather than us trying to see what it is that is wrong with the poor that keeps them poor, now we are trying to understand why the rich have suddenly acquired so much wealth.
What I particularly liked about this book was its use of graphics, a visual turn in social science (or the popularisation of it at least) that has helped highlight the issues associated with inequality. The book begins with a chapter discussing the book Capital in the 21st Century and how that book providing a series of graphs with a U shaped that reiterated the nature and scope of growing inequity. He then discusses Bourdieu’s concept of the field in the following chapter and uses an illustration of a cultural field to make this point too. There really is something powerful about these often simple graphics in clarifying processes occurring around us.
Another repeated theme in this book is the importance of time and how this has been too often dominated by space in social science. As such, he is proposing gradual change, having a clear distrust for ‘revolution’.
Many on the left feel uncomfortable with ‘identity politics’ and feel this distracts from the ‘real issue’ of social class - since, social class issues are felt to be ‘decisive’ and to therefore make clear which side people are on. Savage is not at all convinced by these arguments. In fact, he sees what gets called identity politics as being central to questions of inequality. In large part he sees these issues as deeply imbedded within one another. Gender, sexuality, ethnicity - not only often closely correlate with social class - but he makes it clear that what he calls ‘visceral inequality’ is often visceral due to us being told we live in an age of ‘meritocracy’ and yet we get to see the same old white men with all of the wealth and all of the power. In large part, this supports his argument that we need to look at time as a central concept of social science. This is because wealth is increasingly not achieved by the efforts of the wealthy individual, but rather is a form of rent collection - and old white males have had the most wealth for the most time, and so compound interest has more to do with their current wealth than merit or the contribution they make to the overall wellbeing of our society.
This is a deeply interesting book.
In this book he is looking at how social science has shifted its gaze over recent decades towards inequality. As he says at one point, the telescope has been turned and rather than us trying to see what it is that is wrong with the poor that keeps them poor, now we are trying to understand why the rich have suddenly acquired so much wealth.
What I particularly liked about this book was its use of graphics, a visual turn in social science (or the popularisation of it at least) that has helped highlight the issues associated with inequality. The book begins with a chapter discussing the book Capital in the 21st Century and how that book providing a series of graphs with a U shaped that reiterated the nature and scope of growing inequity. He then discusses Bourdieu’s concept of the field in the following chapter and uses an illustration of a cultural field to make this point too. There really is something powerful about these often simple graphics in clarifying processes occurring around us.
Another repeated theme in this book is the importance of time and how this has been too often dominated by space in social science. As such, he is proposing gradual change, having a clear distrust for ‘revolution’.
Many on the left feel uncomfortable with ‘identity politics’ and feel this distracts from the ‘real issue’ of social class - since, social class issues are felt to be ‘decisive’ and to therefore make clear which side people are on. Savage is not at all convinced by these arguments. In fact, he sees what gets called identity politics as being central to questions of inequality. In large part he sees these issues as deeply imbedded within one another. Gender, sexuality, ethnicity - not only often closely correlate with social class - but he makes it clear that what he calls ‘visceral inequality’ is often visceral due to us being told we live in an age of ‘meritocracy’ and yet we get to see the same old white men with all of the wealth and all of the power. In large part, this supports his argument that we need to look at time as a central concept of social science. This is because wealth is increasingly not achieved by the efforts of the wealthy individual, but rather is a form of rent collection - and old white males have had the most wealth for the most time, and so compound interest has more to do with their current wealth than merit or the contribution they make to the overall wellbeing of our society.
This is a deeply interesting book.
December 29, 2022
I can’t comment too much as I read this book over a considerable amount of time, but the author poses an interesting though sometimes long drawn out argument about dominant forms of looking at inequality and how they inherently exclude other critical dimensions and categories of inequality. The writing could be dense at times so I’m not sure I would recommend this book to somebody who isn’t used to sociological writing. On an unrelated note, the author consistently misspells the country Colombia as Columbia (a pet peeve of mine, as a Colombian).
September 28, 2022
Research and agitation around the issue of growing inequality, from the authors of Spirit Level through to the dense tomes of Thomas Piketty, have reflected the hopes of left wing social scientists that a space for a fight back against the plundering of the ultra-wealthy might now be possible.
It has not worked out quite so straightforwardly. Inequality has turned out to be a flittering phantom of an issue, undoubtedly generating anxiety but showing little evidence of popular support for the measures needed to bring about a reduction of its inequities.
This work by sociologist Mike Savage goes someway to help us understand why growing inequality has not generated the sense of grievance that brings people out onto the streets.
Much of the evidence for the division of populations into a 99 percent who supposedly stand against an avaricious 1 percent which is grabbing all the spoils draws on statistics about income and the earnings of an elite which have expanded up to the upper reaches of the stratosphere.
Savage points out that concentrating on income inequality obscures the fact that the disproportionate gains by the elite have gone hand-in-hand with satisfactory growth of earnings across a large swathe of the population, extending all the way to those above the bottom three deciles, when admittedly things get a lot more difficult.
The core of the book’s argument is that it is inequality measured by wealth, rather than income, which has the most significant implications for the shape of the economy and society. Wealth accumulates from assets which, unlike income, are not so sensitive to market exchanges and which represents the grip that historical forces have over the present. Wealth inequality allows unearned income, understood in economics as ‘rent’, to come fully into view.
Shifting the focus from income inequality to wealth brings the predicament of a different segment of the population into the mix as the critically aggrieved. The radicalism of wage earners is too easily curbed by a salary increase which, though lagging behind the 1 percent, is still enough to support the idea that progress is being made. But when wealth is the measure what is revealed is not just how little of it some groups have, but also the mechanisms which facilitate their deprivation.
Treasure, acquired by way of the grip that history has on the present, shows itself up in the social forces that sustain its accumulation over the longer periods of time. Wealth acquisition derived from gender discrimination, imperialism and racism supports the prediction that the people who have fewer, (or zero), capital assets are women in general, from nations that have suffered under the yoke of colonialism, and ethnic groups tainted by this imperial order and made the subject of racial injustice. That is pretty well the way the cookie and crumbled in reality.
Much of Savage’s work concerns the trajectory of social science and the tools it has and is devising to reveal what results from inequality. Leaning on Bourdieu’s field analysis he shows that this covers not just economic outcomes but also the cultural features of the social formation. Politics is as aspect of this, and the question is posed as to whether an adequate response to inequality is still represented by the division of liberal democratic societies into ‘merchant’ parties which stand for elite interests, and reformist currents which aim for redistribution in line with the needs of ‘outsiders’. He argues that time is up on this particular social cleavage.
The reinforcement of the grip of history over the present means that relatively recent developments, like the liberal democratic national-state capable of delivering social cohesion across class divides, are being eclipsed by a return to imperial formations. The nation is once again not much more than a springboard which the elite classes use to propel themselves into an ascendancy derived from a prominent ranking within the world order of economic and social forces.
When this was last so obviously the case, in the 18th and 19th centuries, democratic politics took the form of a footloose form of radicalism rather than the class-based parties which acted on behalf of vested interests in either the fields of business or redistribution. If that is the case, then wealth inequality will predict that the currents most likely to be drawn into the radical camp will be those who feel disadvantages arising as a consequence of environmental degradation, imperial plunder, and gender and racial injustice.
It has not worked out quite so straightforwardly. Inequality has turned out to be a flittering phantom of an issue, undoubtedly generating anxiety but showing little evidence of popular support for the measures needed to bring about a reduction of its inequities.
This work by sociologist Mike Savage goes someway to help us understand why growing inequality has not generated the sense of grievance that brings people out onto the streets.
Much of the evidence for the division of populations into a 99 percent who supposedly stand against an avaricious 1 percent which is grabbing all the spoils draws on statistics about income and the earnings of an elite which have expanded up to the upper reaches of the stratosphere.
Savage points out that concentrating on income inequality obscures the fact that the disproportionate gains by the elite have gone hand-in-hand with satisfactory growth of earnings across a large swathe of the population, extending all the way to those above the bottom three deciles, when admittedly things get a lot more difficult.
The core of the book’s argument is that it is inequality measured by wealth, rather than income, which has the most significant implications for the shape of the economy and society. Wealth accumulates from assets which, unlike income, are not so sensitive to market exchanges and which represents the grip that historical forces have over the present. Wealth inequality allows unearned income, understood in economics as ‘rent’, to come fully into view.
Shifting the focus from income inequality to wealth brings the predicament of a different segment of the population into the mix as the critically aggrieved. The radicalism of wage earners is too easily curbed by a salary increase which, though lagging behind the 1 percent, is still enough to support the idea that progress is being made. But when wealth is the measure what is revealed is not just how little of it some groups have, but also the mechanisms which facilitate their deprivation.
Treasure, acquired by way of the grip that history has on the present, shows itself up in the social forces that sustain its accumulation over the longer periods of time. Wealth acquisition derived from gender discrimination, imperialism and racism supports the prediction that the people who have fewer, (or zero), capital assets are women in general, from nations that have suffered under the yoke of colonialism, and ethnic groups tainted by this imperial order and made the subject of racial injustice. That is pretty well the way the cookie and crumbled in reality.
Much of Savage’s work concerns the trajectory of social science and the tools it has and is devising to reveal what results from inequality. Leaning on Bourdieu’s field analysis he shows that this covers not just economic outcomes but also the cultural features of the social formation. Politics is as aspect of this, and the question is posed as to whether an adequate response to inequality is still represented by the division of liberal democratic societies into ‘merchant’ parties which stand for elite interests, and reformist currents which aim for redistribution in line with the needs of ‘outsiders’. He argues that time is up on this particular social cleavage.
The reinforcement of the grip of history over the present means that relatively recent developments, like the liberal democratic national-state capable of delivering social cohesion across class divides, are being eclipsed by a return to imperial formations. The nation is once again not much more than a springboard which the elite classes use to propel themselves into an ascendancy derived from a prominent ranking within the world order of economic and social forces.
When this was last so obviously the case, in the 18th and 19th centuries, democratic politics took the form of a footloose form of radicalism rather than the class-based parties which acted on behalf of vested interests in either the fields of business or redistribution. If that is the case, then wealth inequality will predict that the currents most likely to be drawn into the radical camp will be those who feel disadvantages arising as a consequence of environmental degradation, imperial plunder, and gender and racial injustice.
March 14, 2022
The writing is a bit difficult to parse, since Savage will often explain very simply terms in painstaking and tedious detail (without the twist of novelty or nuance to justify it), but then suddenly ramp up the diction, sometimes making reference to original terms which, even though they are explained in the glossary, it is not obvious to the reader that they have encountered a term that requires consulting it. This is reinforced by the inconsistency by which Savage does set aside the space to explain original terms. On top of all of this, the book is absolutely littered with abundant spelling and copy-editing errors, sometimes appearing as frequently as on every third page.
Despite the fact that one of Savage's alleged selling points is the power of visualizations, nearly every visualization he relies on to make his points are nearly illegible, as many of them employ extremely minute differentiations in shades for the "simplistic" sparklines that are otherwise identical. To my knowledge, no copies of the book have been made available in color. Even an online appendix, which I argue would be counterintuitive to the point that the author is trying to make, would be moot in any event, since the conclusive analyses of the figures in text form are more important than whatever might be gleaned from the figures--if they had been made available in legible form and could actually be interpreted. Rather than the figure explaining the text, the text literally serves to explain the figure; one must literally read the detailed explanations offered by Savage leading up to his summary in order to discern which lines are indicating what.
I found some of the points made otherwise to be compelling, but most were painfully obvious, at least to me in any event. Savage offers good critiques of a number of class perspectives and his perspective on time is particularly interesting, but the book simply unravels towards the end. Despite his promises that all of the themes he takes up are indeed relevant to the core understanding he offers, a faithful reading "from cover to cover" fails to deliver on this. Some of the later chapters appear to appeal more to a general overview of sociological approaches that might be useful for undergraduate students, but it's difficult to surmise how they actually unify to a central theme. In this sense, their inclusion reads more like an attempt to stretch the work to cover all bases than to address what's really relevant to the discussion.
Despite the fact that one of Savage's alleged selling points is the power of visualizations, nearly every visualization he relies on to make his points are nearly illegible, as many of them employ extremely minute differentiations in shades for the "simplistic" sparklines that are otherwise identical. To my knowledge, no copies of the book have been made available in color. Even an online appendix, which I argue would be counterintuitive to the point that the author is trying to make, would be moot in any event, since the conclusive analyses of the figures in text form are more important than whatever might be gleaned from the figures--if they had been made available in legible form and could actually be interpreted. Rather than the figure explaining the text, the text literally serves to explain the figure; one must literally read the detailed explanations offered by Savage leading up to his summary in order to discern which lines are indicating what.
I found some of the points made otherwise to be compelling, but most were painfully obvious, at least to me in any event. Savage offers good critiques of a number of class perspectives and his perspective on time is particularly interesting, but the book simply unravels towards the end. Despite his promises that all of the themes he takes up are indeed relevant to the core understanding he offers, a faithful reading "from cover to cover" fails to deliver on this. Some of the later chapters appear to appeal more to a general overview of sociological approaches that might be useful for undergraduate students, but it's difficult to surmise how they actually unify to a central theme. In this sense, their inclusion reads more like an attempt to stretch the work to cover all bases than to address what's really relevant to the discussion.
September 1, 2022
Valuable read on the social science of inequality, drawing from historical, economic, and sociological perspectives. This is in sharp contrast to Heather Boushey's book *Unbound*, which was so dull in its ahistorical, atheoretical, and US-centric lit-review 'analysis' of modern runaway inequality. Sociologists continue to run circles around economists when it comes to trade books about economics; it's pretty embarrassing how proud economists are to just be ignorant about politics and history and it shows in their willful myopia.
This book peaks in its first five chapters, which helpfully locate the renewed attention to economic inequality in the history of social science. I found the framing of the Piketty project as a powerful departure from the traditions of academic economics very helpful and relevant to the framing of my own research. On the other hand, I think Savage is overimpressed by very simple data visualizations.
The remaining chapters touch on inequalities through frames of identity politics, urbanism, technology, and political science. This speaks to the book's admirable ambition to integrate different strands of inequality under a single framework, but they are noticeably shallower and less convincing.
The book's thesis—something along the lines of "the historic weight of an imperial world order is leading the resurgence of interest in inequality through updated mechanisms of capital accumulation"—is argued well enough. But it's hardly as new or radical as the author repeatedly suggests. The book never uses the words neocolonialism or neoimperialism, but Sartre, Nkrumah, and the Non-Aligned Movement did beat him to the punch by over 60 years. The general concept is as old as decolonization itself and familiar to any pan-Africanist or Third Worldist. That modern capitalism has an imperial flavor is an incontrovertible if not trivial argument to most people from the industrialized Global South. It was also kind of weird that Savage comments on the recession of Communist ideology in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the second half of the 20th century just as a sort of statistical trend without interrogating why that happened.
Indeed, for a book arguing that the inequality paradigm is being brought about by imperial re-history, Savage's in-text references are unabashedly dominated by white Western thought. Seriously why did Jason Hickel become the Western anglophone left's go-to stand-in for the Global South?
This book peaks in its first five chapters, which helpfully locate the renewed attention to economic inequality in the history of social science. I found the framing of the Piketty project as a powerful departure from the traditions of academic economics very helpful and relevant to the framing of my own research. On the other hand, I think Savage is overimpressed by very simple data visualizations.
The remaining chapters touch on inequalities through frames of identity politics, urbanism, technology, and political science. This speaks to the book's admirable ambition to integrate different strands of inequality under a single framework, but they are noticeably shallower and less convincing.
The book's thesis—something along the lines of "the historic weight of an imperial world order is leading the resurgence of interest in inequality through updated mechanisms of capital accumulation"—is argued well enough. But it's hardly as new or radical as the author repeatedly suggests. The book never uses the words neocolonialism or neoimperialism, but Sartre, Nkrumah, and the Non-Aligned Movement did beat him to the punch by over 60 years. The general concept is as old as decolonization itself and familiar to any pan-Africanist or Third Worldist. That modern capitalism has an imperial flavor is an incontrovertible if not trivial argument to most people from the industrialized Global South. It was also kind of weird that Savage comments on the recession of Communist ideology in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the second half of the 20th century just as a sort of statistical trend without interrogating why that happened.
Indeed, for a book arguing that the inequality paradigm is being brought about by imperial re-history, Savage's in-text references are unabashedly dominated by white Western thought. Seriously why did Jason Hickel become the Western anglophone left's go-to stand-in for the Global South?
April 28, 2022
I’m going to have to detour into a reading of the related works cited or used as foundational materials of this book, before I am able to comment fairly. The underlying economics are straightforward and consistent with prevailing (sympathetic) empirical presentations. The foray into interdisciplinary analysis will be my focus when I reread the book.
October 10, 2022
A tough slog. I suspect there is great insight somewhere in this book. It escaped me.
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