There is no shadow of a doubt that both Athens & Sparta were deeply unequal societies; with Athens 2/3 being slaves and non-citizens and Spart possibly 4/5. Solon's and Lycurgus' equality did not extend to them. I have clarified that & am sorry that I did not say it clearly originally. Williams says it unambiguously. Similarly, McMahon makes a leitmotiv of this equality by exclusion. I hope things are clear now.
Describing Classical Sparta as having "expunged inequality" is strange. We're talking about a society where more than 80% of the population was enslaved (in a system known for its brutality even compared to other systems of slavery), the majority of free men were non-citizens, and even among the citizens there was a lot of inequality (and citizens who couldn't meet the wealth quota lost their citizenship, leading to the citizen population decreasing exponentially with time).
But the reputation of equality comes because ostentatious display of wealth was banned, and the elites' wealth was *land*. And the Marx quote makes me think of aristocrats shaking their fists at the bourgeoisie, and the rural landowner who looks down on the urban capitalists for their greed, because he doesn't work for his money and so greed doesn't serve a purpose for him. Who can, however, still be correct about the corrupting effects of greed.
Marx was a political economist. In philosophy he was a phenomenologist, a materialist not a Hegelian idealist. What he did for us was apply scientific analysis as it was developing in his era to the history of human societies, arriving at the conclusion that economics is at the center of politics and class the expression of economics. Lately what most impresses me about Marx is his conclusion that change is constant. Nothing is static. Twenty years ago few could look at technology and predict that the analog telephone would be replaced by a digital cellphone. The elements were there but not the new synthesis. Marx was always looking for what forces in the material world were in opposition to each other and would bring about change. Dogmatic Marxists, the Stalinists and their equally rigid bourgeois antipodes don't ever seem to look at capitalism in the fluid way that Marx did. Perhaps they aren't smart enough.
The problem is how do you know something in itself. Enough to act in a way that results in progress, in a progressive resolution of the principle contradiction discovered. Marx makes great use of negation in a logical framework. Most science today looks at the probability of an outcome. Ai has been constructed to look for correlation and then express that with language sophistry. Not to be believed. Dialectical materialism was used by both Lenin and Mao in what might be called applied Marxism. Turing equipped his machine with a series of logical operators like and, or, not. I'm waiting to see someone develop an Ai version of dialectics.
Of course it is dialectic materialism if one talks about Marx. Dialectics is the overall movement. My short reply was not about lecturing or disagreement.
Logic though has no bearing in development of societies - it is about dialectics i.e. the dynamics of change. Innovation is an inherit part of that. That also goes for economics and its permanently changing relations to technology and nature.
With regard to development of societies it is marxist social dialectics - in contrast, for example, to the idealist dialectics of Hegel - which is concerned principally not with abstract thought, but with concrete socio-historical phenomena.
The dialectics of Hegel are idealistic. It is the movement of thought that lies at the root of his whole philosophy. Marx, on the contrary, employed dialectics materialistically. Materialist dialectics is the general movement and development caused by the conflict of contradictions that takes place throughout the universe both in nature and in society, and which is reflected in human thought.
Marx adopts Hegel’s dialectic with the same schema of abstract, undifferentiated universal, followed by its negation in the form of particular determinations, and then to their resolution in a new mediated, more encompassing universal, or the negation of the negation.
Marx’s 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse contains the most extended discussion of his method:
The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labor, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labor, division of labor, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.
Here Marx is describing the dialectic that starts with the abstract universal (population, etc.), then moves to particular determinations (the division of labor, money, etc.), and concludes by reconstructing a new universal that contains these determinations in the form of a mediated unity - state, market etc.
Marx, with regard to his approach of considering change as the only constant, was heavily influenced by antique Greek thinkers, particularly Heraclitus. His seminal idea about change being a fundamental aspect of reality reflects the intensified class struggle of this crucial era. His is commonly known for his famous aphorism that ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’.
Regarding the ‘The Social Dialectics of AI’ this article might be of interest.
Thanks very interesting. I wish the authors writing on equality had read Amartya Sen’s book on The Idea of Justice, where he argues that the relevant “space” is not income or wealth, but “capabilities” to live lives and pursue goals that we have reason to value. It’s not equality in resources, but equality in the opportunities one has (taking into account resources) to “do and be”. Assessing equality in the capabilities space would take into account one’s personal disabilities, social (racial, class, gender, etc) prejudices and hierarchies, as well as how resources and entitlements are distributed.
Thank you for the interesting article,Mr. Milanovic, as well as the recommendations. Amusingly, today I also came across a book by Nat Dyer- “Ricardo’s Dream” - that might fit in nicely with your selections. I am looking forward to finding out.
There is a lot of confusion in the Economy academic scene about Marx:
-) Marx was a philosopher, not an economist. All of his works, without exception, were philosophy works, The Capital included (remember: it is the critique of political economy; “critique” is a very traditional genre of philosophy). As such, in order to fully understand Marx, one has to understand philosophy, and his works must be judged on the merits of being from the field of philosophy.
So, when Marx tells us all humans are equal, he is simply telling an objective, logical truth: all humans are literally equal as humans, i.e. as far as every human being is, essentially, human. This is a universal truth, a logical truth that does not depend on experiments; it is a philosophical truth.
Now, human is just the essence. Every essence can have determinations and expressions. So, one single human being has this genetic code, a beard, a certain height, a certain gender, a certain hair, a certain weight, a certain personality etc. That is this human's particular expression, but an expression of a universality, an essence (the human essence). Male and female (man and woman) are opposite determinations of the human essence, the same way north and south are opposite determinations of the same essence (i.e. space).
With this concept in mind, there is no problem to reconcile the particular with the universal (the micro and the macro). For example: a husband is the expression of a man, who is the determination of the human essence. The universal expression of the husband is the patriarch, i.e. the personification of private property (from which emanates the patriarchal power of the male). A wife is the expression of a woman, human essence, whose universal expression is the biological reproducer of the human species (the particular expression being the mother who gives birth and nurture her children). And so on.
Notice that, in the above example, the material object is the same: from a strict biological point of view, we are still talking about one single human male and one single human female specimen; indeed, that's all there is for a biologist or an anthropologist. But Marx is analyzing the human world, the world of human (subjective) relations with itself. This is the field of what we call nowadays of the Humanities of Human Sciences, which does include the subfield of Bourgeois Economy.
As for Economy itself, well, the talk about inequality is tautological: the very point of its invention lies in the presupposition that resources are scarce and humanity has thus to allocate them unevenly among their individuals in the name of having less scarcity (but never zero scarcity) or less material suffering among the greatest number of individuals possible in the future or in the present. To say inequality is the bane of Economy is the same as telling us Economy should never have been invented in the first place.
P.S.: I may and probably committed many language/terminology errors in this post because English is not my mother language and I wrote this comment in a matter of a few minutes from memory. Please feel free to try to correct and dismantle my argument.
For Marx it is the relationship between humans who possess capital and humans who generate value through their labor that is then appropriated by humans who possess capital. For Marx it is all about the production of value. For liberals it is all about the distribution of wealth accumulated by the capitalist whose entitlement of the accumulation is never questioned in the more fundamental terms of production that Marx focuses on. Once the allocation of capital to production is taken away from the capitalist and put into the hands of the workers Marx believes that more value can be produced thus socialism is an advance over capitalism in pure economic terms.
I do not think it is true that Marx saw himself only as a philosopher. It might have been true until probably around the mid-1850s. But surely Capital vol 2 and 3 have nothing to do with philosophy and everything to do w/ economics. We could likewise say that Smith was only a moral philosopher. But he was not; he was more than that. Finally, we could claim that Keynes was only a politician and pamphleteer. But that would be untrue too. He too was much more than that.
Thank you for writing this. I have a few questions.
1. I recently read someone's opinion that ancient Sparta was the first communist country in the world. Can you comment on that?
2. I wonder what the modern psychology has to say about greed. Quick Internet search returns (very expected) "it is a complex psychological phenomenon that has been the subject of much research and debate." Yet, your review doesn't mention psychologists. Is that perspective completely lacking in all three books?
3. I'd really like to find a book which has a comparative treaty of subjects like this for, say, ancient Greeks and their contemporaries in India and China. I'd also like a perspective from America, Australia and Africa, but that's probably wishful thinking. I could ask an AI, but humans are far better at answering "is it any good?" question. So, if anybody knows of such a beast ..
Sparta wasn't a classless society which is the definition of communism. Sparta was a slave society. Wealth was generated from the bondage of a people the Spartans defeated and then permanently enslaved. There was a Spartan Patrician land owning class and plebian warrior class. The decisions about war and peace were made by the aristocracy but the army was a professional army, educated and trained not a group of toughs owing their allegiance to a particular lord. So the only democratic element was the organization of the professional warrior class. The phalanx is all Sparta was known for. To be effective it requires the warriors to act in coordination as a group. This was an advance over the Achilles approach.
This was a good piece. But wasn't Plato kinda for inequality, with his "Men of Gold, Silver, and Bronze?" Or do you take the view that Plato was being sarcastic or ironic in that segment regarding the Men of Metals?
I have always thought Plato had an effect on the Party organization
organization advocated by Lenin. Only the guardians could be trusted to act in the interest of the ruling class. For Lenin the workers for Plato the land owning wealth at risk aristocracy.
Enjoyed reading this. On the issue of whether "greed" (love of money?) is a necessary ingredient for capitalism, it may be worthwhile to consider not just the most successful companies, but also those struggling to keep above water. A large % of US companies are not breaking even: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-share-of-u-s-companies-with-negative-earnings/
For these companies, motivation to acquire money may arise simply from the pressures of depreciation of assets, erosion of product value, and inflation. Like poor households, corporate losers need to "love" money more than others in order to survive. So drive to get money may be more general in economic systems - not just capitalism.
There is no shadow of a doubt that both Athens & Sparta were deeply unequal societies; with Athens 2/3 being slaves and non-citizens and Spart possibly 4/5. Solon's and Lycurgus' equality did not extend to them. I have clarified that & am sorry that I did not say it clearly originally. Williams says it unambiguously. Similarly, McMahon makes a leitmotiv of this equality by exclusion. I hope things are clear now.
Not seeing the clarification in the original post itself??
Describing Classical Sparta as having "expunged inequality" is strange. We're talking about a society where more than 80% of the population was enslaved (in a system known for its brutality even compared to other systems of slavery), the majority of free men were non-citizens, and even among the citizens there was a lot of inequality (and citizens who couldn't meet the wealth quota lost their citizenship, leading to the citizen population decreasing exponentially with time).
But the reputation of equality comes because ostentatious display of wealth was banned, and the elites' wealth was *land*. And the Marx quote makes me think of aristocrats shaking their fists at the bourgeoisie, and the rural landowner who looks down on the urban capitalists for their greed, because he doesn't work for his money and so greed doesn't serve a purpose for him. Who can, however, still be correct about the corrupting effects of greed.
Marx was a political economist. In philosophy he was a phenomenologist, a materialist not a Hegelian idealist. What he did for us was apply scientific analysis as it was developing in his era to the history of human societies, arriving at the conclusion that economics is at the center of politics and class the expression of economics. Lately what most impresses me about Marx is his conclusion that change is constant. Nothing is static. Twenty years ago few could look at technology and predict that the analog telephone would be replaced by a digital cellphone. The elements were there but not the new synthesis. Marx was always looking for what forces in the material world were in opposition to each other and would bring about change. Dogmatic Marxists, the Stalinists and their equally rigid bourgeois antipodes don't ever seem to look at capitalism in the fluid way that Marx did. Perhaps they aren't smart enough.
It is called dialectics
Fred, dialectical materialism.
The problem is how do you know something in itself. Enough to act in a way that results in progress, in a progressive resolution of the principle contradiction discovered. Marx makes great use of negation in a logical framework. Most science today looks at the probability of an outcome. Ai has been constructed to look for correlation and then express that with language sophistry. Not to be believed. Dialectical materialism was used by both Lenin and Mao in what might be called applied Marxism. Turing equipped his machine with a series of logical operators like and, or, not. I'm waiting to see someone develop an Ai version of dialectics.
Of course it is dialectic materialism if one talks about Marx. Dialectics is the overall movement. My short reply was not about lecturing or disagreement.
Logic though has no bearing in development of societies - it is about dialectics i.e. the dynamics of change. Innovation is an inherit part of that. That also goes for economics and its permanently changing relations to technology and nature.
With regard to development of societies it is marxist social dialectics - in contrast, for example, to the idealist dialectics of Hegel - which is concerned principally not with abstract thought, but with concrete socio-historical phenomena.
The dialectics of Hegel are idealistic. It is the movement of thought that lies at the root of his whole philosophy. Marx, on the contrary, employed dialectics materialistically. Materialist dialectics is the general movement and development caused by the conflict of contradictions that takes place throughout the universe both in nature and in society, and which is reflected in human thought.
Marx adopts Hegel’s dialectic with the same schema of abstract, undifferentiated universal, followed by its negation in the form of particular determinations, and then to their resolution in a new mediated, more encompassing universal, or the negation of the negation.
Marx’s 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse contains the most extended discussion of his method:
The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labor, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labor, division of labor, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.
Here Marx is describing the dialectic that starts with the abstract universal (population, etc.), then moves to particular determinations (the division of labor, money, etc.), and concludes by reconstructing a new universal that contains these determinations in the form of a mediated unity - state, market etc.
Marx, with regard to his approach of considering change as the only constant, was heavily influenced by antique Greek thinkers, particularly Heraclitus. His seminal idea about change being a fundamental aspect of reality reflects the intensified class struggle of this crucial era. His is commonly known for his famous aphorism that ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’.
Regarding the ‘The Social Dialectics of AI’ this article might be of interest.
https://monthlyreview.org/2024/11/01/the-social-dialectics-of-ai/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-social-dialectics-of-ai&mc_cid=5e2c858dd1&mc_eid=f28ed109ad
Thanks very interesting. I wish the authors writing on equality had read Amartya Sen’s book on The Idea of Justice, where he argues that the relevant “space” is not income or wealth, but “capabilities” to live lives and pursue goals that we have reason to value. It’s not equality in resources, but equality in the opportunities one has (taking into account resources) to “do and be”. Assessing equality in the capabilities space would take into account one’s personal disabilities, social (racial, class, gender, etc) prejudices and hierarchies, as well as how resources and entitlements are distributed.
In addition, Sen's view of the justice "convergence" rather than its absolute norm is a smart resolution to the problem of "struggle" to fight for it.
Thank you for the interesting article,Mr. Milanovic, as well as the recommendations. Amusingly, today I also came across a book by Nat Dyer- “Ricardo’s Dream” - that might fit in nicely with your selections. I am looking forward to finding out.
There is a lot of confusion in the Economy academic scene about Marx:
-) Marx was a philosopher, not an economist. All of his works, without exception, were philosophy works, The Capital included (remember: it is the critique of political economy; “critique” is a very traditional genre of philosophy). As such, in order to fully understand Marx, one has to understand philosophy, and his works must be judged on the merits of being from the field of philosophy.
So, when Marx tells us all humans are equal, he is simply telling an objective, logical truth: all humans are literally equal as humans, i.e. as far as every human being is, essentially, human. This is a universal truth, a logical truth that does not depend on experiments; it is a philosophical truth.
Now, human is just the essence. Every essence can have determinations and expressions. So, one single human being has this genetic code, a beard, a certain height, a certain gender, a certain hair, a certain weight, a certain personality etc. That is this human's particular expression, but an expression of a universality, an essence (the human essence). Male and female (man and woman) are opposite determinations of the human essence, the same way north and south are opposite determinations of the same essence (i.e. space).
With this concept in mind, there is no problem to reconcile the particular with the universal (the micro and the macro). For example: a husband is the expression of a man, who is the determination of the human essence. The universal expression of the husband is the patriarch, i.e. the personification of private property (from which emanates the patriarchal power of the male). A wife is the expression of a woman, human essence, whose universal expression is the biological reproducer of the human species (the particular expression being the mother who gives birth and nurture her children). And so on.
Notice that, in the above example, the material object is the same: from a strict biological point of view, we are still talking about one single human male and one single human female specimen; indeed, that's all there is for a biologist or an anthropologist. But Marx is analyzing the human world, the world of human (subjective) relations with itself. This is the field of what we call nowadays of the Humanities of Human Sciences, which does include the subfield of Bourgeois Economy.
As for Economy itself, well, the talk about inequality is tautological: the very point of its invention lies in the presupposition that resources are scarce and humanity has thus to allocate them unevenly among their individuals in the name of having less scarcity (but never zero scarcity) or less material suffering among the greatest number of individuals possible in the future or in the present. To say inequality is the bane of Economy is the same as telling us Economy should never have been invented in the first place.
P.S.: I may and probably committed many language/terminology errors in this post because English is not my mother language and I wrote this comment in a matter of a few minutes from memory. Please feel free to try to correct and dismantle my argument.
For Marx it is the relationship between humans who possess capital and humans who generate value through their labor that is then appropriated by humans who possess capital. For Marx it is all about the production of value. For liberals it is all about the distribution of wealth accumulated by the capitalist whose entitlement of the accumulation is never questioned in the more fundamental terms of production that Marx focuses on. Once the allocation of capital to production is taken away from the capitalist and put into the hands of the workers Marx believes that more value can be produced thus socialism is an advance over capitalism in pure economic terms.
I do not think it is true that Marx saw himself only as a philosopher. It might have been true until probably around the mid-1850s. But surely Capital vol 2 and 3 have nothing to do with philosophy and everything to do w/ economics. We could likewise say that Smith was only a moral philosopher. But he was not; he was more than that. Finally, we could claim that Keynes was only a politician and pamphleteer. But that would be untrue too. He too was much more than that.
Thank you for writing this. I have a few questions.
1. I recently read someone's opinion that ancient Sparta was the first communist country in the world. Can you comment on that?
2. I wonder what the modern psychology has to say about greed. Quick Internet search returns (very expected) "it is a complex psychological phenomenon that has been the subject of much research and debate." Yet, your review doesn't mention psychologists. Is that perspective completely lacking in all three books?
3. I'd really like to find a book which has a comparative treaty of subjects like this for, say, ancient Greeks and their contemporaries in India and China. I'd also like a perspective from America, Australia and Africa, but that's probably wishful thinking. I could ask an AI, but humans are far better at answering "is it any good?" question. So, if anybody knows of such a beast ..
Sparta wasn't a classless society which is the definition of communism. Sparta was a slave society. Wealth was generated from the bondage of a people the Spartans defeated and then permanently enslaved. There was a Spartan Patrician land owning class and plebian warrior class. The decisions about war and peace were made by the aristocracy but the army was a professional army, educated and trained not a group of toughs owing their allegiance to a particular lord. So the only democratic element was the organization of the professional warrior class. The phalanx is all Sparta was known for. To be effective it requires the warriors to act in coordination as a group. This was an advance over the Achilles approach.
This was a good piece. But wasn't Plato kinda for inequality, with his "Men of Gold, Silver, and Bronze?" Or do you take the view that Plato was being sarcastic or ironic in that segment regarding the Men of Metals?
I have always thought Plato had an effect on the Party organization
organization advocated by Lenin. Only the guardians could be trusted to act in the interest of the ruling class. For Lenin the workers for Plato the land owning wealth at risk aristocracy.
Enjoyed reading this. On the issue of whether "greed" (love of money?) is a necessary ingredient for capitalism, it may be worthwhile to consider not just the most successful companies, but also those struggling to keep above water. A large % of US companies are not breaking even: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-share-of-u-s-companies-with-negative-earnings/
For these companies, motivation to acquire money may arise simply from the pressures of depreciation of assets, erosion of product value, and inflation. Like poor households, corporate losers need to "love" money more than others in order to survive. So drive to get money may be more general in economic systems - not just capitalism.