Economic Inequality

“Where is the fulcrum to uplift our world and roll it forward?”

—W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (1928)

In this work’s early going Lyman Tower Sargent was instrumental is guiding me toward a number of utopias that treat of the redistribution of income or wealth using progressive taxation. Sargent’s database of “Utopian Literature in English: An Annotated Bibliography from 1516 to the Present” (<https://openpublishing.psu.edu/utopia/>) proved an invaluable tool as did the wealth of scholarship published in Utopian Studies and presented at The Society for Utopian Studies conferences. The nascent version of this book was read by my friend Dana Plank. His editorial suggestions were always valuable and timely. James Bockmier edited the finished work contributing greatly to its overall readability. His expansive background and meticulous eye were an invaluable resource. The support of Anthony Mason, Peter Lang Senior Commissioning Editor, Ireland and the UK, as well as the anonymous reviewers is greatly appreciated. An earlier discussion of some of the issues this work explores appeared in the journal Utopian Studies, “Three Moderate Solutions to Income Inequality in Utopia: Hertzka, Herzl, and Wells.” All pictures are licensed from Mary Evans Picture Library, London.

This work explores what utopian writers have said about economic inequality. Its transdisciplinary focus is literary utopias—some familiar and some long forgotten—works that E. F. Bleiler calls novels of social theory.¹ It is not an economic analysis but a study in utopian social philosophy; as such, its aim is to challenge assumptions about economic inequality by prodding the moral imagination. I have not selected the authors I discuss in this book for their popularity or notoriety—though some are among the most widely read—but for their utopian focus on economic inequality. “Very few utopias stand out as great works of literature,” notes Krishan Kumar, as their “didactic purpose overwhelms any literary aspiration.”² In such works, observes Yevgeny Zamyatin, “the writer first concerns himself with an abstract idea and then embodies it in images, events, characters.” The resulting plots, Zamyatin concedes, “seldom achieve faultless literary form.”³ Utopian treatments of economic inequality are no exception.

While our current age struggles with the prospect of a handful of people owning half the world’s wealth, it may be useful to reflect on the nature of this problem (if it is a problem) in its broadest contours including utopian precedents warning us of its coming and directing us to possible solutions. In Inequality, philosopher Harry Frankfurt discusses the extent to which economic inequality is a problem. Frankfurt argues that if economic inequality is morally undesirable, “it is on account of its almost irresistible tendency to generate unacceptable inequalities of other kinds.”⁴ As utopian writers envision a future taming or at least tempering the extremes of both poverty and wealth, it is instructive to explore the instruments they employ; by what measures have they defeated poverty or diminished the threats boundless fortunes pose, thereby revitalizing society?

Plato’s ideal society in the Laws stipulates that no one should be more than four times wealthier than their less fortunate neighbors.⁵ Regarding people’s intuitions about income inequality psychologist Pascal Boyer reports, “Humans do not generally believe that any individual’s contribution could possibly be hundreds or thousands of times greater than anyone else’s.”⁶ This has led some utopians, like Thomas More and Edward Bellamy, to level everyone’s income (discussed in Chapter 6). But many utopians see benefits from unequal but controlled economic outcomes. George Orwell, for example, believed that while rigid limitations on income are not possible, “there is no reason why ten to one should not be the maximum normal variation,” since “within those limits some sense of equality is possible.”⁷

Chapters 2–4 describe numerous remediating devices—whether economic, social, or political—utopians have proposed to reduce the extremes of economic inequality. These measures include (among others) alternative allocations of surplus labor, equalizing opportunity, expunging racism, free universal compulsory education, gender equality in the workplace, motherhood as a paying job, public housing, redistribution of income or wealth through progressive taxation, reimagining marriage and divorce, transparency—economic and political, universal basic income, and (in Chapter 5) violence and revolution. Chapter 7 explores utopias (or dystopias) that picture our future if economic inequality is left to flourish unchecked; its discussion includes the works of H. G. Wells, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, and Cory Doctorow.