In The Politics of Inequality, Michael Thompson's aim is to “render visible what has become largely hidden in American social life,” namely that significant economic inequality is incompatible with sound principles and practices of democracy (p. 179). In response he seeks to recover what he claims is a long, venerable and, for much of our history including the Founding, even dominant “egalitarian tradition.” Those tempted to dismiss out of hand such a view of our past should be careful.

As Thompson repeatedly clarifies, by “egalitarian tradition” he does not have in mind some utopian ideal of absolute equality and communalism. Rather, he invokes another common conception of egalitarianism that accepts “small gaps” of economic inequality as long as those gaps do not create some groups of people with considerably more political and social power than others (p. 26). This view, that economics should be subordinate to politics and the public good—often considered to require a relatively narrow band of inequality—is something Thompson traces through the larger sweep of Western political thought, starting in classical Greece. In this narrative, even modern thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith advocate a liberalism that is admittedly more market-friendly and individualistic than standard Greco-Roman impulses but nevertheless remains economically tempered in such a way as to stand compatible with more republican ideals. In America, this marriage between liberalism and republicanism has worked rather well, especially at the time of the Founding, because originally both ideologies were sensitive to the notion that forces of “domination” inimical to liberty could come in economic as well as political form, and because abundant and cheap land greatly mitigated against severe economic disparity in the first place. In this way, Thompson's view of early America, at least, is not so different from that of someone like Tocqueville, who was most vividly struck by the remarkable “equality of conditions” he observed here in the 1830's. And Thompson is exactly right to stress that the Founders were not the libertarians some would make them out to be. At the time of his first inaugural Jefferson, while looking out across democratic and roughly equal America, did say that the “sum of good government” was only to keep people from injuring one another and “not take from the mouth of the labor the bread it has earned” (Jefferson's First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801). But this is the same man who, some years earlier in a letter to Madison, while looking out across aristocratic and highly unequal France, noted that conditions there called for progressive taxation and urged that in such situations “legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property” (Jefferson to Madison, Oct. 28, 1785).

The great lament for Thompson is that while this alliance between republicanism and an originally benign liberalism has mostly privileged, throughout our history, the kind of egalitarian outlook he defines and champions, economics has more recently become liberated from politics, becoming answerable now (on the right and the left) primarily to its own logic of growth and efficiency without concern for equality. This, he sees, is the deeply troubling culmination of the rise and demands of industrialization, shifting us from an agricultural economy to a wage-labor economy, which not only gave capitalists practical power to protect their significantly advantaged status but gave capitalism the strength to take over liberalism, aided and abetted by a string of thinkers from Alexander Hamilton (the bad boy of the Founders), to William Graham Sumner, to Milton Friedman.

Behind all of this is an explicit theory of political history, which Thompson argues is best understood as a constant and complex interaction of ideas and immediate practical realities and limits. Thus he reads notions about economic inequality in our national past as such notions were simultaneously shaped by and gave shape too critical political powers and economic developments during various epochs from the Founding to the present. Furthermore, from this Thompson takes heart—contra many from the “Cambridge School” (Skinner, Pocock, etc.) of history, who tend to marginalize the contemporary relevance of past thought—that an effective resurfacing of marginalized traditions can help reshape contemporary politics. Thompson's theory is underserved in the text by a virtual absence of any discussion of the robust philosophical and historiographical debates about such matters. However, he nicely develops his welcome intuition by examining writings from a wide array of prominent politicians and public intellectuals.

There is much to learn from this book, which is quite clear and disciplined in the way it develops and defends its often subtle and unconventional thesis. But, in the end, at least this scholar is still left to wonder about both the causes and scope of the problem Thompson sees. Some thinkers seem to be getting too much credit here and others not enough. For example, at one level Locke's labor theory of property puts a limit on what one may justly earn, but what of Locke's notion that the development of money liberated man to “heap up as much [wealth] as he pleased” and do so without invading the right of others? And, yes, someone like Madison placed great (perhaps too much) hope on the ability of an extended republic to mollify the effects of factions driven significantly by economic disparity. But this position is laid out with the view that the “first object of Government” must be to protect the “different and unequal faculties of acquiring property” (“Federalist Paper no. 10” 1787). The record really leaves one to wonder whether, if Madison stepped forward today, he would be more concerned with the domination coming from income and ownership inequality or with a large, distant welfare state admittedly scaled back in the last thirty years but one still actively and extensively redistributing wealth. And, speaking of today, one also wonders–in a season where the leading Presidential candidate on the right is famous for leading the fight for campaign finance laws–if we really have entirely lost a sense that individual economic status affects individual political power and participation. Questions such as these deserve more attention than Thompson gives them. As for the story of how economics has gotten separated from politics, to the extent this has happened, surely it is tied up with how politics itself has gotten increasingly liberated from anything higher than politics itself. In other words, the inability of politics to assert itself over economics—the way Plato and Aristotle suggested it should (a point Thompson himself makes)—would seem to be more powerfully explained by traditions coming out of modernity and postmodernity that leave politics bereft of the normative and epistemological resources critical to its footing as the architectonic discipline, to put it in Aristotelian terms. Politics today seems powerless not simply vis a vis economics, but vis a vis all domains of social life. Surely the likes of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Nietzsche and Heidegger, to name a few, have done at least as much as Milton Friedman to clear the civic landscape of hedges against the strong individual getting all she can.

Our past indeed warns us of the political danger and moral turpitude of a society where some have so little relative to others. But our past also teaches us, with equal vigor, that attempts to eliminate most wealth disparities are fraught with the temptations of political despotism. Michael Thompson deserves great credit for educating us, with passion and elegance, concerning the first half of this conundrum.