Abstract
The Killing Fields of Inequality by Goran Therborn is a call, to academic sociologists and to politically engaged citizens positioning themselves to the left of the political spectrum, for inequality to become a central concern of their practices and discourses. The book serves two purposes. On the one hand, it aims to offer a broad overview of academic research and debate on social inequalities in their historical and global context and to integrate into sociology the empirical and theoretical work of social epidemiologists such as Michael Marmot and Richard Wilkinson and philosophical economists such as Amartya Sen. In this endeavour, it privileges breadth over depth seeking to make evident the affinities between separate disciplinary fields and to launch a programmatic framework for future work. On the other hand, it aims to be a ‘civic intervention’ (p. 35) contributing to the development of an egalitarian policy agenda. It is written from a particular political standpoint that aims to counter the continuing dominance in public affairs of economic liberalism and of the increasing political sway of a financial and corporate oligarchy.
In the relatively short space of 184 pages, the author casts a far-reaching gaze over empirical findings on the impact of social inequalities on individual and social life patterns, philosophical considerations on the definition and typology of equality, the mechanisms of unequalization and equalization, the current and historical patterning of inequalities within and between countries, and finally, the ‘decisive battlefields of future (in)equality’, as the last chapter is titled.
The author begins with a grim portrayal of current social life as a socio-cultural order ineluctably shaped by social inequalities that blight the lives of people in high- and low-income countries alike. The title of the book is derived by the negative impact of social inequalities on the mortality rates and life expectancy of the people experiencing them. For Therborn, inequality kills but only after humiliating, demeaning and restricting life physically, socially and culturally for children and adults alike.
One of the author's stated aims is to draw attention to the multi-dimensionality of inequality. Accordingly, he positions his definition of inequality within Amartya Sen's capabilities approach to human well-being and development and proposes that, for research and political purposes, equality should be defined as the equality of ‘capability to function fully as a human being’ (p. 41). Capability is itself a multi-dimensional concept encompassing all those preconditions necessary for a person to develop and flourish including freedom (political, spiritual, reproductive), education, access to nourishment and to health services, and protection from arbitrary violence. Unfortunately, Therborn does not offer a detailed discussion of the capabilities approach so the interested readers, not already conversant with it, will need to seek further sources before they will be able to appreciate its implications for current debates on the equality of opportunity and outcome. Therborn's definition suggests that not all social differences and distances qualify as inequalities, only those that impact negatively on the distribution of capabilities. Clearly, this is different from economic conceptions of inequality which are typically measures of the skewedness of the differential allocation of a measured variable. Moreover, although economic indicators do not carry a normative moral evaluation, Therborn's definition suggests that inequalities are inherently unjust and immoral.
Therborn defines three types of inequalities: vital, existential and resource, on the basis of his three basic dimensions of human existence as organisms, persons and actors. However, he does not offer an account of their interrelationships other than to say that they operate cumulatively. He appears to broadly accept the causal mechanisms between income and existential inequalities, on one side, and health inequalities on the other side as posited by social epidemiologists. The analytical separation of these types enables Therborn to present a set of puzzling questions on the contemporary patterning of inequalities. The first relates to the failure of even the most advanced welfare states to address substantive health inequalities amongst their populations; the second to the political success, relative to the other two types of inequality, of existential egalitarianism and the third one questions the relationship between international economic convergence, with the economic growth of China, India and South East Asia, and intense domestic economic polarization.
Therborn proposes four mechanisms that produce inequality and four corresponding mechanisms that produce equality. These paired mechanisms are: exploitation–redistribution/rehabilitation; exclusion–inclusion; hierarchization–dehierarchization; and distantiation–approximation. These mechanisms are theorized to arise out of the operation of systemic, dynamic arrangements and processes as well as purposeful individual and collective distributive action. The author considering the present historical moment as one of socially harmful unequalization characterized by social sundering, economic waste and an erosion of democracy devotes the last part of the book to a consideration of the historical moments, contexts and forces of equalization. He identifies ‘three decisive battlefields of future (in)equality’. The first is how we understand and debate the issue of inequality. In the author's view, this debate should centre on the devastation wrought on individuals and societies by health inequalities rather than on public resentment for the lifestyles of the super-rich. The second is the direction of development of the three key institutions of contemporary inequality: the family, capitalism and the nation. Therborn believes in the power of progressive policy-making in embedding mechanisms of equalization to counter the institutionalization of inequality. The final and most important battlefield for Therborn is that for the orientation of the middle classes of post-industrial and emerging economies: will the world's middle classes self-define in terms of an individualist consumption that excludes people without comparable spending power or will they seek to form wider social alliances aiming for an egalitarian order that will counter, on the one hand, the abject misery meted out at the outcasts and the excluded, and, on the other, the staggering, undeserved wealth accumulation of ‘the oligarchs of financial and rent capitalism’ (p. 183)?
Overall, this is a book of remarkable scope and range. It will be of interest both to readers seeking a panoramic introduction to a sociological consideration of inequality and to those interested in the potential implications of inequality for current and future political contestation.