BOOK REPORT: THE GREAT LEVERLER—VIOLENCE AND THE HISTORY OF INEQUALITY by WALTER SCHEIDEL

 

AT BEDTIME, NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, I found myself engrossed in reading—not a detective or Sci-Fi novel—but instead, Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler, a history book that proved both a compelling read and a disturbing story. The Stanford University professor’s thesis is that social inequality, the gap between rich and poor in terms of wealth accumulation and income, something found in societies across the globe and throughout history, that this gap can only be lessened when the polity or city-state, kingdom, country, empire, or what have you receives a substantial enough “shock” to its system. And he provides examples of shocks or forces strong enough to effect greater equalization and redistribution of wealth and resources within societies. Scheidel uses, darkly perhaps, the imagery of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as the agents of change or forces he believes are most efficacious in bringing about higher levels of social equality, forces that are as relevant today as they were thousands of years ago: War, Revolution, Societal Collapse and Plague, with today’s “War”—modern, mass-mobilization warfare—as the one that most readily overturns the social order in favour of equality. In other words, for societies that have grown unequal, where elites control most of the wealth, only rarely do significant redistributive efforts (say a progressive tax regime) succeed through peaceful means alone, and only temporarily, at that. He says the main drivers of equalization are found on the battlefield, in civil conflict, in the ecological or political disintegration of a society, or from pandemic disease. In his broad historical survey, he suggests the ‘natural order’ or default character of human society is invariably one of income inequality, with elites acquiring the majority share of the wealth. It is only with the shocks provided by one or more of the Four Horsemen that allow radical equalization schemes to mature into fruition.

His purpose in writing The Great Leveler, is not to examine economic development broadly, but rather to discover “how the fruits of civilization are distributed, what causes them to be distributed the way they are, and what it would take to change these outcomes.” (22) He suggests the forces of change he’s identified—the Four Horsemen—are the same throughout history, and are with us still, today.    

I quote extensively from his conclusions and record a particularly powerful summary statement that illustrates his premise:

 

     “But there was always one Big Reason behind every known episode of substantial leveling [equalizing wealth and income among people in a society]. There was one Big Reason why John D. Rockefeller was an entire order of magnitude richer in real terms than his richest compatriots one and two generations later, why the Britain of Downton Abbey gave way to a society known for universal free healthcare and powerful labour unions, why in industrialized nations around the globe the gap between rich and poor was so much smaller in the third quarter of the twentieth century than it had been at its beginning—and, indeed, why a hundred generations earlier ancient Spartans and Athenians had embraced ideals of equality and sought to put them into practice. There was one Big Reason why by the 1950s the Chinese village of Zhangshuangcun had come to boast a perfectly egalitarian distribution of farmland: one Big Reason why the high and mighty of Lower Egypt 3,000 years ago had to bury their dead with hand-me-downs or in shoddily manufactured coffins, why the remnants of the Roman aristocracy lined up for handouts from the pope and the successors of Maya chiefs subsisted on the same diet as hoi polloi; and one Big Reason why humble farmhands in Byzantium and early Islamic Egypt and carpenters in late medieval England and hired workers in early modern Mexico earned more and ate better than their peers before or after. These Big Reasons were not all the same, but the shared one common root: massive and violent disruptions of the established order. Across recorded history, the periodic compressions of inequality [closing the gap between rich and poor] brought about by mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and pandemics have invariably dwarfed any know instances of equalization by entirely peaceful means.” (443) (Italics mine.)

 

He goes on to say, “[h]istory does not determine the future. Maybe modernity really is different. In the very long run, it may well turn out to be.” (443)

 

BUT BEFORE YOU REACH for the nearest bottle of Soma and go off to take in a feelie, I’d like to pick apart with you a few of his main arguments which for me are provocative, yet compelling. From the book’s title we understand this will be a survey on a grand scale with an extensive overview of many of the world’s societies. And so, it is.

Scheidel begins with the basics, with our ancient hominid heritage, the great apes—gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos*, our closest mammalian relatives. He notes, as have many researchers, that ape society is fiercely hierarchical; there are ranks below the dominant “alpha” in the group all the way down to the smallest, single male. 

 

With hierarchies, inevitably comes an unequal sharing of resources with the strongest getting first choice, be it food, territory, or mates, until the alpha male is deposed by a stronger ape who then continues the same pecking order. Can we say our human evolution has taken us that far from our ape ancestors?

MOVING AHEAD MILLENNIA, Scheidel examines human social organization at the beginning of the Holocene, when the ice caps are melting and landscapes across the northern hemisphere change, forcing early hunter-gatherer societies to develop farming and herding to feed themselves. He concludes

 

“Only the domestication of food resources had the potential to transform economic activity and social relations on a global scale: in its absence, stark inequalities might have remained confined to small pockets along coasts and rivers**, surrounded by a whole world of more egalitarian foragers.” (34-35)

 

He adds: “There can be no doubt that most of the inequality we observe in the following millennia was made possible by farming.” (36) The world, he says, took a different path with the domestication of einkorn wheat, barley, rice, and other grains and with the herding of ungulates.

 

SCHEIDEL MEASURES ECONOMIC INEQUALITY by examining a variety of “proxy data”. For the Paleolithic period, when humans were strictly hunter-gatherers, examples of inequality may be suggested by “high-status” graves that hold items such as worked beads that require a considerable amount of labour to make, suggesting some sort of social organization with hierarchies and elite structures. Evidence is scarce, however. Later, during the Mesolithic period, house sizes, high-status grave goods and evidence of “prestige goods” indicate elite formations within the increasingly sedentary, farming cultures. He says, “According to this analysis, inequality and its persistence over time has been the result of a combination of three factors: the relative importance of different classes of assets, how suitable they are for passing on to others, and actual rates of transmission.” (38) Here the difference is clear. Societal wealth of foragers and hunter-gatherers is limited by the mobile nature of their cultures.

BUT IN FARMING SOCIETIES, wealth is accumulated in a variety of ways—through tools, herd animals, houses, and most importantly, land. These, in turn, are passed on through clan or family ties, both creating and perpetuating wealthy elites at the expense of the rest of society.

 

SCHEIDEL IS MAKING A LARGE CLAIM: namely that non-hunter-gatherer societies are prone to inequality and the formation of elites (with some exceptions) who, over time, then gather to themselves the wealth of their societies. In one study, he notes that a global data set of about 1/3 of simple forager societies existing today have inheritance rules for “movable property”, but only one in twelve “recognizes the transmission of real-estate.” (39) On the other hand, almost all societies practising intensive agriculture have rules for both, with fixed, non-transportable wealth (houses, land, etc.) favouring elite accumulations of societal resources. WHAT THEN, he asks, are the forces most likely to create periods in which elite wealth accumulation is curtailed and the wealth of society distributed most widely? 

 

Again, the Four Horsemen are the most reliable forces for redistributing societal wealth. Scheidel says that throughout history legislative decrees, regulations, reforms, etc. act to shift wealth only temporarily from the top ten percent downward. He cites the admirable New Deal laws in the United States that gave organized labour new footing, advanced more equitable tax rates, old age benefits, welfare, a jobs program, and other legislation during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But, such progressive legislation followed the great shock of WWI and continued beyond with the even greater shock of WWII. And so, the rich of America were compelled to  sacrifice some of their wealth, redistributing it to the society at large. This arrangement lasted several decades.  But, just as earlier agrarian societies were unable, solely by peaceful means, to maintain levels of wealth and income equality so, too, do modern industrial societies fail in preventing elite wealth accumulation unless impacted by one of the Horsemen. And even then, only temporarily.

 

IN TERMS OF WAR, modern industrialized¹ warfare, or as Scheidel says  “total war [is] a total leveler” (115), has the dubious honour of being able to ravage more land, destroy more property, and kill more soldiers and civilians than at any other time in recorded history. So, there’s that. But how does total war, such as was experienced from 1914-1945, if we view the two wars as part and parcel of the same conflict, bring about greater social equality, particularly in countries most involved in the fighting? For that matter, Scheidel asks, how did Britain go from being a colonial powerhouse and militarily dominant at the beginning of the twentieth century to the first industrialized nation to sponsor a universal healthcare system only half a century later? Here, the concept of “total” war is the most relevant element in Scheidel’s analysis. All strata of society, from the community at large to the business community to the legislative, religious, and cultural bodies were engaged in the war effort. Laws and regulations, new taxes and quotas changed the ebb and flow of manufacturing and industrial outputs. Conscripted soldiers taken from the population—millions of them—changed the makeup of the workforce both before and after the wars as did, of course, the loss of millions of lives, both military and civilian, in the conflicts. And with the reintegration of millions of decommissioned soldiers returning to civilian life at the end of WWII, elites were forced to provide benefits such as housing and education for the veterans to maintain social cohesion and not create a cohort of disgruntled former soldiers.

Scheidel calls this period (1914-1945) “the Great Compression” of the social strata that separated various classes in society. Wealth and income were compressed so the gap between the rich and poor shrank significantly—and rapidly—as programs such as healthcare, wealth taxes, etc. were adopted across the major combatants’ societies. As he says

 

     “Two related issues are at stake; the direct effect of war on inequality while the war was being fought…and its longer-term effect over the course of the following decades.” (131)

 

In many of those societies, because of the shocks of total warfare during the first half of the twentieth century groups and political movements formed, promoting and demanding greater equality for their populations. These levels of relative social equity remained in place for decades until the 1970s when income inequality once more began to rise.

 

Scheidel cites ancient Athens as an example as another polity that developed greater equality among its citizenry (excepting for slaves) during years of war with Persia and then with its fellow city-state, Sparta, in the Peloponnesian Wars. He suggests the necessity for Athenians to commit to total war united the citizenry in a common project which developed and maintained egalitarian principles and levels of democracy rarely seen before or since, in that period often called Athens’s “Golden Age”. He provides a variety of examples of war from different times and places and concludes the two world wars of the twentieth century were unique in their ability to affect levels of social inequality. Wars of previous centuries often involved much smaller armies, fighting in remote regions, with elites on both sides usually able to profit from the conflicts and to maintain their position afterwards.

Similarly, another of his horsemen, Revolution, or civil war, is often fought around particular issues and complaints, which if resolved, ends the fighting. Again, elites generally remain in place or are replaced by the winning side’s elites. The point being is that Revolution² is less effective in changing income disparities than War.  

 

Societal Collapse is very effective in destroying elite wealth. When income streams dry up due to large-scale social collapse, the accumulated wealth of elites naturally contracts. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the late fifth and sixth centuries, and elite systems failed all the way down to the local level, one “proxy” bit of evidence that Scheidel cites indicating improvement in the lives of the common people are in skeletal remains. The bones of people born after the collapse of the Roman Empire suggest that people were healthier and lived longer than during the time of Roman rule. In other words, wealth and resources were more equitably distributed among the population. In time, of course, new elite structures grew to replace the Roman ones.

Plague is interesting in that it affects across society. In general, however, elites are better positioned to survive disease than the general population by their greater access to good food and medicines. Plague, like the bubonic plague of the 14^th Century, did have a significant impact in lessening disparities in income distribution across Europe by making wages for labour more expensive. With fewer workers to work the lands, they could demand higher wages from the land owners. And this remained the case for the better part of a century following the plague of the 1350s. Gradually, elites were able to tamp down wages as populations once more grew.

 

NOTE: This had been a much longer post than I intended, but Scheidel’s book was so rich with detail, it was hard for me to make any kind of proper synopsis of it. Props to any and all who read this to the end!

 

SCHEIDEL ends his study saying there is still much work to be done on researching the ebb and flow of inequality throughout history, and in finding more ways to measure it with greater granularity of evidence and example. His tone though, for want of a better word, is of some exasperation. He says that his research suggests most human cultures and societies, from time immemorial, seem (depressingly!) hardwired for inequality, though probably not hunter-gathers as a rule. Perhaps, he says, hierarchy and elite domination are simply part of our ape heritage and we just need to get used to it. He goes on to speculate about the future and says that the kind of wars fought in the middle of the twentieth century, the ones that brought about rapid, systemic changes to society, that type of warfare is now probably defunct. He doesn’t see mass-mobilization or armies of millions as feasible in this age of professionalized military and voluntary recruitment. Modern munitions, high-tech weapon systems, drones, AI-enabled tanks and artillery, etc., mean that large armies are no longer necessary. And total war between nuclear-armed countries is highly unlikely given the possible consequences.

 

So, the great change-agent of (total) War seems off the table and the second horseman of Revolution is harder to develop in representative democracies where many conflicts are diffused through political negotiation. The full-scale Collapse of societies with modern, globalized economies and technologies he thinks unlikely, as well. And disease and Plagues will always be with us, but so will modern medical technology and public health systems. Thus, he concludes the Four Horsemen are no longer the threats they once were to the status quo of society. And without them, systemic inequality and elite wealth accumulation and dominance can only be countered through far less effective peaceful means.

 

HE ASKS how will our societies, going forward, address inequality and income-disparity? Will we, he muses, achieve it through science and technology, perhaps evolving into a “globally interconnected hybrid body-machine super-organism and no longer worry about inequality” (443) or by becoming genetically enhanced super-beings of equal strength and power? He is of course being tongue-in-cheek here, but also, I think, somewhat exasperated to be left with such large, unanswered questions.

In another part of his conclusions, he lists a variety of peaceful approaches and initiatives that can be introduced to curtail social inequality. Many seem reasonable and workable, and many are well known. But without the Four Horsemen to force us into changing our ways, Scheidel asks, do we have the will to act on our own? It's an interesting question.

 

Sorry for the long read.

Cheers, Jake.  

 

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*Genetically, Bonbos may be our saving grace as these cousins from our ape ancestor-tree are less hierarchically oriented and use sex for just about any form of social interaction that put even rabbits to shame! (Party On! My little friends! Party on!)

**Scheidel suggests that hunter-gathering societies were necessarily more egalitarian because when you move around from food source to food source, you don’t accumulate a lot of stuff, and you carry only what is necessary. You share what you gather or hunt to maintain social cohesion. Fishers along rivers, as well as along coasts, develop more hierarchical social systems because of the nature of their food sources and the social organization needed to harvest them, which in turn can lead to stratification and systemic inequality.

 

1. Some historians cite the American Civil War (1860-65) as the first “industrialized” or “mechanized” war, given its use of the burgeoning manufacturing facilities of the Industrial Revolution, mass-produced rifles and cannon, railroads, telegraph communication, gunboats, etc., in addition to the mass mobilization of each side’s population in the war effort. Scheidel suggests that the conflict could also be seen as a total war between two separate states or nations, North and South. 

Interestingly, he suggests that income disparity in the United States did not decrease significantly following the conflict. He cites the fact that elites on both sides were able to maintain their levels of wealth accumulation, with Southern elites continuing to exploit the labour of newly freed slaves (nearly four million of them in a country of 31 million) who received no compensation for generations of captivity.   

 

2.  The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a bit different in its effect on changing income disparity, in that the Bolsheviks came into power with a radical new scheme of governance—communism—that had as its core mandate raising the living standards of the “proletariat”. This allowed Revolution to have a greater impact on the society for a longer period. Of course, elites emerged and communism, especially under Stalin, mutated into a much more repressive regime.   

[I should note that despite what might be considered a rather grim portrayal and prognosis of the human condition and human social organization by Scheidel, many parts of his book are fascinating to read. His use of "proxy" data and tax records, births and death rolls, modern statistical analysis, etc., to determine levels of income disparity across a range of societies and covering thousands of years was compelling and mostly reinforced his thesis. There is much to be profited from in his survey, much food for thought.  Ed.]

 

Scheidel, Walter. The Great Leverler—Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press. 2017. Print.