Preface

Radical egalitarianism – the dream of equal freedom – is now the orphan of a defunct socialism. The unruly and abandoned child of the liberal enlightenment had found a home in nineteenth-century democratic socialism. Protected and overshadowed by its new foster parent, radical egalitarianism was relieved of the burden of arguing its own case: as European socialism’s foster child, economic and political equality would be the by-product of an unprecedented post-capitalist order, not something to be defended morally and promoted politically on its own terms in the world as it is.

It thus fell to reformists, be they laborist, social-democratic, Euro-communist or New Deal, to make capitalism livable for workers and the less well-off, a task they accomplished with remarkable success in some of the advanced economies. But in the process, the egalitarian project was purged of its utopian yearnings. Its objectives were narrowed to the pursuit of a more equal distribution of goods and formal equality of political rights. The “world turned upside down” that Gerrard Winstanley had promised as the seventeenth-century Diggers were occupying Saint George’s Hill near London was not to be; workers and farmers would have to settle for a world smoothed out. Over the years even this project has encountered increasingly effective resistance and experienced major political reversals. The century-long decline in the income shares of the very rich in virtually every country on which we have adequate data came to an abrupt halt in the final quarter of the twentieth century (Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez 2011). In many of the world’s largest economies – the US, the UK, India, China, and others – the economic fortunes of the very rich regained much of their lost ground.