The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century.

AuthorComegna, Anthony
PositionBook review

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

Walter Scheidel

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, 444 pp.

This is a grisly and depressing tome if I have ever read one, though hopelessness and despair are common features of the human experience. They are cornerstones in our history, and we ignore history's tragedies to our own peril. Inspired by Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), Walter Scheidel draws together a vast array of quantitative and narrative evidence for his central thesis that

throughout recorded history, the most powerful levehng invariably resulted from the most powerful shocks. Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics.... Hundreds of millions perished in their wake. And by the time the dust had settled, the gap between the haves and the have-nots had shrunk, sometimes dramatically [p. 6]. A classicist, historian, and demographer all in one, Scheidel integrates a variety of world historical evidence into a convincing, if depressing, portrait of wealth equalization over time and across space. Most world histories are plagued with problems that only a regional specialist might recognize, but Scheidel does not allow himself to stray from the subject at hand and his narrative plays a structural, supportive role for the real star: huge amounts of data on inequality.

I am an intellectual, social, and political historian interested primarily in ideas, individuals, institutions, and the interactions between each. I am not a quantitative historian and am in no way qualified to speak on the validity of Scheidel's argument in this regard. My goal, therefore, is to take his case as given and proceed to distinguish the implications for libertarians and libertarianism if indeed significant leveling of wealth has occurred only as the result of widespread death and destruction.

The volume begins with a broad discussion of the argument, methodology, and "A Brief History of Inequality," from the primordial use of brute force to the modern exercise of international finance capitalism. At no point does the author endorse either equality or inequality. Rather, he argues that the concentration of wealth (measured primarily by Gini coefficients--"the extent to which the distribution of income or material assets deviates from perfect equality") has been a fundamental fact of human existence, essentially, forever. The fruits of inequality include the ultimate foes in libertarian thought, the state and all its attendant extractive parts. The egalitarian harvest, however, is a bloody and detestable mess. Scheidel maintains a careful and measured distance...

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