Origins of Inequality in Human Societies

Bernd Baldus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317205951
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Classes sociales et disparités économiques

Since the beginning of social life human societies have faced the problem how to distribute the results of collaborative activities among the participants. The solutions they found ranged from egalitarian to unequal but caused more dissension and conflict than just about any other social structure in human history. Social inequality also dominated the agenda of the new field of sociology in the 19th century. The theories developed during that time still inform academic and public debates, and inequality continues to be the subject of much current controversy.

Origins of Inequality begins with a critical assessment of classical explanations of inequality in the social sciences and the political and economic environment in which they arose. The book then offers a new theory of the evolution of distributive structures in human societies. It examines the interaction of chance, intent and unforeseen consequences in the emergence of social inequality, traces its irregular historical path in different societies, and analyses processes of social control which consolidated inequality even when it was costly or harmful for most participants. Because the evolution of distributive structures is an open process, the book also explores issues of distributive justice and options for greater equality in modern societies. Along with its focus on social inequality the book covers topics in cultural evolution, social and economic history and social theory.

This book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of sociology, economics and anthropology – in particular sociological theory and social inequality.

1 Dimensions of Inequality

DOI: 10.4324/9781315616773-1

Three themes recur in the accounts of the first European explorers who reached the coasts of Africa, South America, the Pacific Islands and Asia. One is the dream of wealth and conquest. Apart from the press gangs only the hope for riches could motivate men, most of them poor, to succumb to the hardship of life and death at sea. The second are rumors of sexual license among the natives. Stories, embellished in the telling, that their marriages “are not with one woman but with as many as they like, and without much ceremony, and we have known someone who had ten women” must have been much on the minds of men who lived out their teens and early twenties onboard ship deprived of female company. The third theme, commented on with a mixture of disbelief and fascination, is the social structure of the societies they met. Vespucci, surveying the land he saw on his voyage to Brazil in 1502, fancied himself “near the terrestrial paradise.” The climate was warm, the air was fragrant with the scent of blossoms and food was abundant, but what impressed him most was the apparent equality of the natives. In 1521, Antonio Pigafetta, official chronicler for Magellan’s voyage around the globe, felt on more familiar ground when he visited the Raja of Brunei, guarded by 300 bodyguards with drawn rapiers. Pigafetta’s delegation could address the king only through a hierarchy of messengers, the highest of whom would whisper through a speaking tube in a wall. On the other side, unseen, one last servant would convey the message to the king. When they finally were allowed into his presence they had to make elaborate obeisance before addressing him.

I tried very hard to understand their life and customs because for twenty-seven days I ate and slept with them. They have no laws or faith, and live according to nature. They do not recognize the immortality of the soul, they have among them no private property, because everything is in common; they have no boundaries of kingdoms and provinces, and no king! They obey nobody, each is lord unto himself; no justice, no gratitude, which to them is unnecessary because it is not part of their code.

(Cited in Bergreen 2003: 98, 99)

Inequality preoccupied human beings long before these events. Distributive structures, from egalitarian to unequal, are among the earliest documented features of social life. Reactions varied just as much, from Aristotle’s assertion that “It is … just and clear that there are by nature free men and slaves” to Rousseau’s complaint that “man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” Short of sex and salvation, nothing has roused human passions more than the question who should get what.

Inequality continues to divide today’s societies. In the US the share of total income going to the top 10 percent of the population reached a high of 49 percent in 1928, then fell sharply during the Second World War, remained stable just below 35 percent until 1978, and then rose rapidly to 49.7 percent in 2007 (Piketty and Saez 2010). Between 1979 and 2007, after-tax incomes rose by 18 percent for the lowest fifth of American households, and by 275 percent for the top 1 percent. During this period, overall shares in income declined for all but the top fifth of the population (United States Congressional Budget Office, 2011). Inequality also varied significantly between countries. Whereas top incomes increased substantially over the past 30 years in English-speaking countries and in India and China, the increase was much lower in continental Europe and Japan (OECD 2008; Atkinson et al. 2009). Poverty rates show similar changes over time and between countries (Brady 2009). On the international scale the number of countries in the poorest category increased from 25 in 1960 to 43 in 1976, and to 71 in 2000 (Milanovic 2005). A recent decline in global inequality was mainly due to growing incomes in India and China and the stalled economies of Western countries (Milanovic 2013). Last but not least, income and wealth disparities were also major causes of social conflict. The duration and casualties of post-1960s civil conflicts around the world were positively associated with levels of social inequality (Milanovic 2013). Such long-term variations offer a first glimpse of the volatility of inequality and its social consequences.

When sociology emerged as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, the search for the causes of social inequality was the primary concern of Saint-Simon, Comte, Spencer, Sumner, Marx and Durkheim. If they were the founding fathers of the new field of sociology, inequality was its founding problem. They created the archetypical explanations of social inequality as a result of domination and power, as a reflection of inherited differences or biological advantages, or as a functional response to societal needs. These views laid the groundwork for later, more specialized debates: whether inequality was a product of social conflict or impersonal imperatives, whether it was a functional structure of empty spaces waiting for competent applicants or a segmented labor market shaped by economic and political power, whether it was based on material differences or on identity and status, or whether in modern societies class divisions were replaced by a fluid post-modern diversity.

An Outline of the Book

This book offers a comprehensive new theoretical analysis of the nature of social inequality in human societies. There are two reasons for such a project. First, theories matter because they guide our research. They tell us what evidence to collect and what questions to ask of it. They can lead us to important features of the social world but can also obstruct our view. If we think that social processes are governed by laws, we are unlikely to see the causal role of chance in human affairs. If we presume that human actions are shaped by external determinants or rational constraints, we will not have much interest in creative or non-rational behavior. If we assume that the long-term effects of inequality are beneficial or inevitable, we will see harmful outcomes as transient and unimportant and dismiss the search for more egalitarian social structures as pointless. Such assumptions are reflected in research. Scientific journals overwhelmingly publish articles reporting strong relationships between variables, whereas only a small portion of those that find null (chance) results are written up and submitted, and few of these are accepted (Mervis 2014). It is rare to find studies which argue that failing rather than efficient markets, and irrational rather than rational choices, contributed to inequality in current societies (Hacker and Pierson 2010; Stiglitz 2012), or that its history is turbulent and unpredictable rather than a steady progress towards ever greater prosperity (Piketty 2014).

The second reason is that over the past decades sociological interest has shifted from the roots of inequality to its symptoms. In one of the more curious recent twists, research on material inequality declined at the same time as discrepancies in wealth and income increased in many societies, (Coelho et al. 2005; Dollery et al. 2008). Sociologists turned instead to racial, ethnic or gender differences (Myles 2003; Baldus 2004). Such sectoral studies revealed important empirical characteristics, but they also moved away from asking basic theoretical questions. Talcott Parsons’ work in the 1950s was one of the last attempts to develop a general theory of the causes and functions of inequality in social systems.

A re-examination of this topic is thus long overdue. The central problem I explore in this book is how the results of collaborative efforts can be distributed among the participants. More specifically I want to understand how and why distributive structures emerge, stabilize and change in complex, contingent environments which offer multiple options for human action.

Chapter 1 outlines the book’s content and defines the social resources involved in distributive decisions. It then examines how these resources were divided in three exemplary inequality structures: European feudalism, the Indian caste system and an African slave-holding society. In each case the growth of inequality began with small precipitating causes whose consequences were not anticipated. Its subsequent consolidation was due to separate dynamics of social control which reinforced these inequality structures even though they were detrimental to the welfare of most of the people involved. These case studies also illustrate the capricious historical course of inequality. Feudalism came to a relatively sudden and spectacular end, whereas caste and slavery endure in varying forms to this day.

Chapter 2 puts early sociological theories of inequality into the context of pre-industrial religious ideas, of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophical and economic debates and of the political and social turbulence surrounding the industrial revolution. Nineteenth century sociologists, in particular, faced a world of rapid and far-reaching change, of spectacular new wealth and appalling poverty, of political unrest and social tensions. These conditions profoundly affected their views of inequality.

Chapter 3 offers a critical examination of five classical explanations of social inequality which still inform sociological and public debates. They saw the causes of inequality in biological processes of competition and selection, in class struggle, in institutional and organizational dynamics, in hierarchy as a necessary pre-requisite for the pursuit of social goals and in subjective needs for domination and conspicuous social status. Subsequent writing has elaborated and criticized these theories, but I have considered it only where it substantively added to classical ideas.

The goal of this chapter is threefold. First, I want to give a concise critique of each explanation of social inequality which avoids their authors’ often lengthy excursions into unrelated or period-bound areas. My second objective is to show that most of these theories were based on common premises: inequality was derived from universal causes, emerged largely independent of people’s will, endured because its advantages outweighed its costs and developed along predictable historical lines. They therefore paid little attention to the subjective motives and responses of the participants, to the dynamics that maintained inequality even where it was dysfunctional or harmful, and to options for alternative distributions of wealth.

Third, I want to highlight a number of rarely noted references in the work of Marx, Spencer, Sumner and Durkheim to the role of chance and contingency in the growth of inequality, to the power of persuasion and force to shape subjective responses to inequality and to its irregular historical growth. These insights were for the most part incidental by-products of their authors’ historical research and did not change their convictions. Worried or, in the case of Marx, encouraged by an unsettled time, and with an envious eye on the rapid progress of the natural sciences, classical theorists preferred the retrodictive fallacy of taking the frequency and longevity of inequality in human history as signs of the providential working of social laws or universal needs.

Such deterministic and rational-functional logics exacted a price: crucial aspects of the rise of social inequality in human societies disappeared from view. Chance as a causative factor became “a very unwelcome guest, ubiquitous but studiously concealed, ignored and even denied the right to exist by virtually everyone” (Boudon 1986: 173). As for harmful consequences, sociologists sided with Durkheim that no human institution based on error and lies could last, and that “irrational hierarchy maintenance along with potentially self-interested, malicious conduct will dissolve and be replaced by the relatively neutral goals of organizational efficiency and productivity” (Roscigno 2011: 358). The same held for biological explanations of inequality. Theories of cultural evolution, from Herbert Spencer to modern Neo-Darwinism which transformed Darwin’s theory early in the twentieth century, had a strong bias toward the positive and adaptive. Harmful consequences of social inequality were seen as the natural purging from society of the weak or unfit, or were altogether ignored.

Sociological and biological determinism also reduced or eliminated the role of individuals in the genesis of social inequality. Sociologists talked much about agency but focused mostly on its effects. Even Marx, who stressed the need for class action, felt he had to enlist historical necessity as a midwife to give birth to his favorite child, an egalitarian communist society. In spite of repeated calls to bring people back into sociology, “recognizably human actors seem to escape our grip: the stage is set, the script is written, and the roles are handed out, but the actors strangely never reach the scene” (Giddens 1979: 253). Neo-Darwinist theories of cultural evolution were just as averse to studying individual agency. For them evolution was driven by the external forces of mutation and selecting environments. Individuals therefore had no autonomous selection-influencing role. What appeared to be intent or free will was in fact guided by inherited pre-dispositions toward adaptive, “viable” or “competent” behaviors. Redundant, irrational or harmful cultural traits were negligible by-products of a fundamentally beneficial selection.

Deterministic or rationalist bias also influenced the long-term view of inequality. Social theories produced a plethora of developmental schemes where history followed predetermined paths, and hoped that statistical snapshots of arbitrarily chosen historical event sequences would reveal general social mechanisms which worked independent of time and context. The twists and turns of real history were dismissed as “mere noise, a nuisance in the process, a form of instability or unreliability, a lack of robustness, not meaningful change that requires explanation” (Isaac and Lipold 2012: 7).

Not all analyses suffered from these limitations. One of the best recent studies of the evolution of social inequality argues that I share this premise, but only as a first step. Anyone who explores the origins of a major cultural institution such as social inequality eventually nee...