Economic Inequality
Utopian Explorations
Summary
(Kenneth M. Roemer, Emeritus Fellow, University of Texas System Academy of Distinguished Teachers. Author of The Obsolete Necessity, Utopian Audiences, and (ed.) America as Utopia
«Utopian alternatives to current, persistent and increasing inequality matter: as William Blake said, ‘What is now proved was once, only imagin’d’, and so Donald Morris examines a wealth of possibilities, some outlandish, but all conceivable, and many eminently feasible, from a tradition of literary and imaginative forms of political and social theory. A hopeful and invigorating read.»
(Tom Boland, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University College Cork)
This work explores what utopian writers have said about economic inequality. Its transdisciplinary focus is literary utopias—novels of social theory—by authors seeking solutions to the problems of economic inequality. The work challenges our moral assumptions about economic inequality—its potential for resolution—or its inevitability and the ultimate bifurcation of society. It is not an economic treatise but an exploration in social philosophy in its utopian expressions. Economic inequality sets arbitrary limits on whose contributions will benefit society, thereby squandering talent, limiting opportunities, and stifling competition—capriciously restricting the pool of competitors—by class or gender or race. As utopian writers envision a future where the extremes of poverty and wealth have been tempered, 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?
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- FM Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Inequality: Context and Problems
- Chapter 2 Instruments of Change: Economic Reforms
- Chapter 3 Instruments of Change: Social Reforms
- Chapter 4 Instruments of Change: Political Reforms
- Chapter 5 Violence and Revolution
- Chapter 6 Economic Leveling
- Chapter 7 The Future of Economic Inequality: (Mostly) Dystopian Visions
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
- Series Index
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
The German National Library lists this publication in the German
National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the
Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Morris, Donald, 1945-author.
Title: Economic inequality: Utopian explorations / Donald Morris.
Description: Oxford; New York: Peter Lang, 2024. | Series: Ralahine
Utopian studies, 1661-5875; volume 32 | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023056297 (print) | LCCN 2023056298 (ebook) | ISBN
9781803741765 (paperback) | ISBN 9781803741772 (ebook) | ISBN
9781803741789 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Utopias in literature. | Income distribution in literature.
| Social problems in literature.
Classification: LCC PN56.U8 M68 2024 (print) | LCC PN56.U8 (ebook) | DDC
809.93372--dc23/eng/20240129
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023056297
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023056298
Cover image: Slums, Public domain photo from Rawpixel
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Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG
ISSN 1661-5875
ISBN 978-1-80374-176-5 (print)
ISBN 978-1-80374-177-2 (ePDF)
ISBN 978-1-80374-178-9 (ePub)
DOI 10.3726/b20831
© 2024 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne
Published by Peter Lang Ltd, Oxford, United Kingdom
info@peterlang.com - www.peterlang.com
Donald Morris has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.
All rights reserved.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,
and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.
This publication has been peer reviewed.
About the author
Donald Morris is Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Springfield. His PhD in Philosophy is from Southern Illinois University (1978). Previous books include Taxation in Utopia: Required Sacrifice and the General Welfare (2020) and Tax Cheating: Illegal—But Is It Immoral? (National Book Award recipient in Political Science, 2012).
About the book
“This relevant, clearly defined study isn’t constricted by its primary focus on late nineteenth-century American utopias, written when inequality flourished. Morris enriches this focus with chronological comparisons to well-known and lesser-known American utopias in other periods; international contexts from non-American authors; and interpretive perspectives by utopian specialists, political scientists, philosophers, and sociologists. But the book’s most striking quality is the variety of reforms identified and discussed. This variety greatly enhances our understanding of utopists’ war on inequality.”
– Kenneth M. Roemer, Emeritus Fellow, University of Texas System Academy of Distinguished Teachers. Author of The Obsolete Necessity, Utopian Audiences, and (ed.) America as Utopia
“Utopian alternatives to current, persistent and increasing inequality matter: as William Blake said, ‘What is now proved was once, only imagin’d’, and so Donald Morris examines a wealth of possibilities, some outlandish, but all conceivable, and many eminently feasible, from a tradition of literary and imaginative forms of political and social theory. A hopeful and invigorating read.”
– Tom Boland, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University College Cork
This work explores what utopian writers have said about economic inequality. Its transdisciplinary focus is literary utopias—novels of social theory—by authors seeking solutions to the problems of economic inequality. The work challenges our moral assumptions about economic inequality—its potential for resolution—or its inevitability and the ultimate bifurcation of society. It is not an economic treatise but an exploration in social philosophy in its utopian expressions. Economic inequality sets arbitrary limits on whose contributions will benefit society, thereby squandering talent, limiting opportunities, and stifling competition—capriciously restricting the pool of competitors—by class or gender or race. As utopian writers envision a future where the extremes of poverty and wealth have been tempered, 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?
This eBook can be cited
This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.
“Where is the fulcrum to uplift our world and roll it forward?”
—W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (1928)
Contents
Acknowledgments
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.
Introduction
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.
In An Economics of Utopia (1993) Simon Zadec notes, “there has been no systematic review of the economic content of utopias.”8 This work addresses only one aspect of the economic content of utopias—their treatment of economic inequality—and whether systematic or not I will let the reader decide. In recent years the number of authors contributing to the discussion of economic inequality has swelled to include economists (such as Thomas Piketty, with his foundational effort Capital in the Twenty-First Century), historians, philosophers, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists concerned with economic inequality’s adverse effects on society. Thus, in addition to the utopian authors this book discusses are writers from diverse fields whose insights bring clarity and context to what otherwise appears (to some) an intractable problem—vast and growing income and wealth inequality.
One can view the history of moral progress as the gradual recognition of existing conditions as harmful to society. The fight for religious freedom, the anti-slavery movement, the battle for women’s suffrage, the labor union movement, the feminist movement, the campaigns for civil rights, disability rights, gay rights (including same-sex marriage), and gender recognition rights were—and to the extent they are ongoing, are—further examples of the tortured path of moral progress. Whether, and to what degree, economic inequality exacerbated each of these moral struggles illustrates Frankfurt’s point noted earlier. Sociologist Howard Becker explains that “Even though a practice may be harmful in an objective sense to the group in which it occurs, the harm needs to be discovered and pointed out. People must be made to feel that something ought to be done about it.”9 Sociologist Stephen Pfohl notes that this is how child abuse became a recognized problem in the 1960s. “Despite documentary evidence of child beating throughout the ages, the ‘discovery’ of child abuse as deviance and its subsequent criminalization are recent phenomena.”10 Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) memorialized the recognition of economic inequality as a problem: “However abundant goods may be,” declares his narrator, “when everyone, by whatever pretexts, tries to scrape together for himself as much as he can, a handful of men end up sharing the whole pile, and the rest are left in poverty.”11 Though economic inequality is a ubiquitous and longstanding problem, it took moral advocates, including utopians, to point out the harm that the extremes of wealth and poverty produce in society—and to pose innovative and often practical solutions.
This book’s multiplicity of topics and their transdisciplinary treatment limit the depth of coverage available for any particular subject. To promote continuity I have chosen authors, when possible, who treat of more than one topic. William Morris, for example, appears in the discussions of education, the dignity of work, the physical environment, and revolution in utopia. Like the curator of a museum of ideas, I have tried to make the inclusion of an author’s original words—especially those from an earlier age—as inobtrusive as possible, balancing aesthetic and substantive considerations. When paraphrasing, I have tried to follow H. G. Wells’s advice not to turn “good and beautiful English into bad.”12
Though perhaps curious for utopian scholarship, this work’s emphasis on economic inequality led me to specify a contemporary context for pecuniary amounts appearing in the past. I have indexed English Pounds and US Dollars for inflation as of 2023. For consistency I have converted English Pounds to US Dollars at the average exchange rate for 2022 of 1.237. The purpose of this exercise is not economic precision but instilling a sense of scale for the magnitude of economic inequality across time. Thus, $1,000 in an 1887 utopia would be worth $32,300 in 2023. For converting English Pounds in the past to their current equivalent I have used the Bank of England’s inflation calculator: <https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator> For converting US Dollars in the past to their current equivalent I have used the calculator at Measuring Worth, Purchasing Power Today—US $: <https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/uscompare/>
1 E. F. Bleiler, “Introduction,” in Three Prophetic Novels of H. G. Wells (New York: Dover Publications, 1960), ix. “Utopian social theory” is one of three forms Sargent identifies. Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 1–37, 4.
2 Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 25.
3 Yevgeny Zamyatin, A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamaytin, ed. and trans. Mirra Ginsburg (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), 166–167.
4 Harry G. Frankfurt, Inequality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), x.
5 Plato. Laws, trans. A. E. Taylor in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), bk. 5, 744.
6 Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 198.
7 George Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” in Essays (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1998; Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 336.
8 Simon Zadek, An Economics of Utopia: Democratising Scarcity (Aldershot, England: Avebury, 1993), 106–107n164.
9 Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: The Free Press, 1963), 162.
10 Stephen Pfohl, “The ‘Discovery’ of Child Abuse,” Social Problems 24 (February 1997), 310. “In a four-year period beginning in 1962,” he says, “the legislatures of all fifty states passed statutes against the caretaker’s abuse of children.”
11 Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), bk.1, 38.
12 H. G. Wells, Mankind in the Making (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 137.
Details
- Pages
- XII, 356
- Publication Year
- 2024
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781803741772
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781803741789
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781803741765
- DOI
- 10.3726/b20831
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2024 (April)
- Keywords
- competition dignity division of labor economic inequality eugenics exploitation gender equality labor unions leveling poverty progressive taxation revolution social debt social philosophy surplus labor utopian
- Published
- Oxford, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, 2024. XII, 356 pp., 12 fig. b/w.