Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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Milton Friedman famously remarked that a society that “puts equality before freedom will get neither.” Philosophers like Harry Frankfurt cautioned against a zeal for equality per se, insisting that what really matters is the absolute welfare of the poor rather than their relative level of wealth. Margaret Thatcher accused the Left of being content to have the poor be poorer so long as the rich were as well.
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The welcome contribution of Williams’s book is to show that many of the great thinkers of the Western philosophical canon wouldn’t have been surprised by this development. It inverts the common conservative argument that arguing against economic inequality is somehow contrary to the thrust of classical Western thought. If anything, it’s the casual and lazy dismissal of concerns with economic inequality that constitute an intellectual deviation and decline from the norm.
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Plato, in the Laws, defined “inequality as a central problem of politics.” Plato warned that inequality would empower “vice” and that it “undermines civic friendship and harmony” in the polis.
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Hobbes advises a prudent sovereign to redistribute wealth as needed to prevent instability provoked by plutocratic ambition on the part of the wealthy or envy and resentment on the part of the poor.
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In The Wealth of Nations, he expressed deep concern about how capitalists treated labor, noting that “masters” will form a “tacit but constant and uniform combination to not raise the wages of labour above their actual rates.” Smith anticipated Marx in worrying that the division of labor could warp individuals by not enabling them to develop different capacities and aspects of their personality — instead imposing hyper-specialization and repetition of the same dreary task over and over again. He recommended the state step in to ameliorate this problem through providing educational and cultural opportunities for the poor.
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This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition … is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.
✏️ quote by Smith about how admiring the rich is a corrupting influence on our morals. 🔗 View Highlight
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worthy and diverse socialist and social democratic candidates, of course: Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, R. H. Tawney, Leonard Hobhouse, Simone de Beauvoir, Ernst Wigforss, Rudolf Meidner, Michael Harrington, Martin Luther King, Paul Tillich, and Angela Davis
✏️ massive followup of people to look into. 🔗 View Highlight