Inequality Is the Default State of Civilization
Inequality is not an aberration to be corrected but a recurring structural feature of complex societies, one that grows naturally unless deliberately checked and the checking always comes at a cost.
"Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically."
Will Durant's observation is bracing because it forces a choice most political rhetoric evades. Freedom and equality are not complementary goods that can be maximized together; they exist in tension. Laissez-faire economies produce enormous inequality, as 19th-century England and America demonstrated. Suppressing inequality requires constraining freedom, as Soviet Russia demonstrated. The "best that the amiable philosopher can hope for," Durant writes, is approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity not equality of outcome.
The historical record supports this. The concentration and dispersion of wealth follows a rhythmic pattern across civilizations: wealth accumulates in fewer hands until the strain becomes unbearable, then is redistributed through legislation, revolution, or conquest, only to begin concentrating again. Rome, France, China the cycle repeats. What varies is the mechanism of redistribution. Land reform in postwar Japan and Korea was one of history's rare peaceful redistributions, and it worked precisely because it was radical, complete, and enforced by external powers (MacArthur, American Cold War policy) who were indifferent to local elites' objections.
Graeber complicates this further by arguing that "inequality" itself is a framing device that forecloses radical thought. Talking about inequality implies we can tinker with coefficients; talking about domination or exploitation implies we might need to rethink the entire structure. The word "inequality" is, as he puts it, "practically designed to encourage half-measures."
Takeaway: Inequality is not a bug in civilization but a feature that must be periodically and deliberately counteracted and the language we use to describe it shapes whether we can even imagine real solutions.
See also: Elite Overproduction Destabilizes Societies | Industrial Policy Works When States Learn From Markets | Functional Institutions Are the Exception Not the Rule