Includes bibliographical references (pages [463]-496) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: What Future for Inequality? Blame it on Sex -- From Aboriginal Equality to Limited and Unstable Inequality -- The Dynamics of Religious Legitimation -- The State, Civilization, and Extreme Inequality -- The Critical Break : The Bourgeoisie Unchained -- Theological Revolution and the Idea of Equality -- The Shift Toward Secular Ideology -- Workers Gain Formal Political Power -- From American Exceptionalism to the Great Compression -- Simon Kuznets' Happy Prognosis Crushed in an Ideological Coup -- Inequality, Conspicuous Consumption, and the Growth Trap -- The Problem is Inequality, Not Private Property and Markets -- What Future for Inequality?
Summary:
"Whereas President Barack Obama identified inequality as "the defining challenge of our time," this book claims more: it is the defining issue of all human history. The struggle over inequality has been the underlying force driving human history's unfolding. Drawing on the dynamics of inequality, this book re-interprets history and society. Beyond according inequality the central role in human history, this book is novel in two other respects: First, transcending the general failure of social scientists and historians to anchor their work in explicit theories of human behaviour, this book grounds the origins and dynamics of inequality in evolutionary psychology, or more specifically, Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Second this book is novel in according central importance to the critical historical role of ideology in legitimating inequality, a role typically ignored or given little attention by social scientists and historians. Because of the central role of inequality in history, inequality's explosion over the past 45 years has not been an anomaly. It is a return to the political dynamics by which elites have, since the rise of the state, taken practically everything for themselves, leaving all others with little more than the means with which to survive. Due to elites' persuasive ideology, even after workers in advanced capitalist countries gained the franchise to become the overwhelming majority of voters, inequality continued to increase. The anomaly is that the only intentional politically driven decline in inequality occurred between the 1930s and 1970s following the Great Depression's partial delegitimation of elites' ideology"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.