The Return of Inequality
Social Change and the Weight of the Past
by Mike Savage
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Pub Date May 18 2021 | Archive Date May 18 2021
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Description
A pioneering book that takes us beyond economic debate to show how inequality is returning us to a past dominated by empires, dynastic elites, and ethnic divisions.
The economic facts of inequality are clear. The rich have been pulling away from the rest of us for years, and the super-rich have been pulling away from the rich. More and more assets are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Mainstream economists say we need not worry; what matters is growth, not distribution. In The Return of Inequality, acclaimed sociologist Mike Savage pushes back, explaining inequality’s profound deleterious effects on the shape of societies.
Savage shows how economic inequality aggravates cultural, social, and political conflicts, challenging the coherence of liberal democratic nation-states. Put simply, severe inequality returns us to the past. By fracturing social bonds and harnessing the democratic process to the strategies of a resurgent aristocracy of the wealthy, inequality revives political conditions we thought we had moved beyond: empires and dynastic elites, explosive ethnic division, and metropolitan dominance that consigns all but a few cities to irrelevance. Inequality, in short, threatens to return us to the very history we have been trying to escape since the Age of Revolution.
Westerners have been slow to appreciate that inequality undermines the very foundations of liberal democracy: faith in progress and trust in the political community’s concern for all its members. Savage guides us through the ideas of leading theorists of inequality, including Marx, Bourdieu, and Piketty, revealing how inequality reimposes the burdens of the past. At once analytically rigorous and passionately argued, The Return of Inequality is a vital addition to one of our most important public debates.
Mike Savage is Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and author of Social Class in the Twenty-First Century, Globalization and Belonging, and The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics.
Advance Praise
“A major sociological contribution to the ongoing global debate on inequality and the return of social class. A must-read.”—Thomas Piketty, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, author of Capital and Ideology
“With a wide-ranging, original, and visionary argument and engagingly written, The Return of Inequality is a major contribution, the crowning of an exceptionally productive career focused on the sociology of inequality, social change, and culture in the UK, Europe, and the world.”—Michèle Lamont, Harvard University, past president of the American Sociological Association
“Empirical analyses have documented increasing inequality over recent decades. There have been passionate calls to action. But the analyses and the action need to be linked by careful consideration of just how to think about inequality, including its locations, dimensions, forms, and visceral experiences. The Return of Inequality responds to that need with insight, deep thought, and important new perspective.”—Craig Calhoun, Arizona State University
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780674988071 |
| PRICE | $35.00 (USD) |
