Visions of Inequality : From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War

“How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?”

Branko Milanovic imagines posing this question to six of history’s most influential economists. Probing the works of these key thinkers in the context of their lives, Milanovic charts the evolution of the concept of inequality across the centuries.

We cannot speak of inequality in general, he argues: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place. Visions of Inequality takes us from François Quesnay, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category determined by one’s relation to the means of production. Later, Vilfredo Pareto reconceived class in terms of elites versus the rest, while Simon Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide.

Milanovic further explores why inequality receded from scholarship during the Cold War, before gaining renewed attention in economics today. An invaluable intellectual genealogy, Visions of Inequality brings nuanced insight to a hotly contested idea.