These professors of equality refuse to see how fond we are of inequality

Equality: What It Means and Why It Matters by Thomas Piketty and Michael J. Sandel

This book has greatly disappointed us. We had hoped these two eminent professors, who have long studied the yearning for equality found in democracies since the American and French Revolutions, might bring clarity to a subject usually treated by politicians in a muddled and hypocritical way.

Thomas Piketty, Professor of Economics at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and the Paris School of Economics, is an authority on the history of economic inequality since the 18th century, which he examined in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published to éclat in 2014.

Michael Sandel, the Anne T and Robert M Bass Professor of Government at Harvard, has for several decades written and lectured to large audiences on justice, and in 2020 published The Tyranny of Meritocracy.

Last year Piketty and Sandel talked to each other in Paris about equality, and the book under review consists of an edited transcript of their conversation.

They are so determined to respect each other’s findings, so polite in the dreary manner adopted by the great and the good at international conferences, that quite soon an air of bogusness pervades their exchanges.

Where has one heard this sort of thing before? In Bouvard and Pécuchet, Flaubert’s masterpiece about two men who strive to acquire encyclopaedic knowledge, and in the course of their researches compile a Dictionary of Received Ideas.

Piketty and Sandel do not question whether bounds ought, for both practical and philosophical reasons, to be set to the pursuit of equality. They instead set out to discover ways in which parliaments can be made to contain a more representative sample of the population, it being taken for granted that, for example, only a member of the working class can represent the working class.

One mechanism they consider is a lottery. But this idea first occurs to them when they are wondering how to widen university entrance, another field in which conspicuous inequalities are found.

And here the difficulties of their position start to become apparent. For these prophets of equality are not themselves equal. They are members of an elite, renowned professors at universities which have long provided a blatantly disproportionate share of the ruling class.

The discrepancy is embarrassing. They seek to atone for it by widening access to university. Nowhere do they face the elementary fact that a university, if it is true to its calling, must and should be unequal.

From the 1960s, vast damage was done to schools in Britain by trying to turn them into engines of equality. Grammar schools were seen as an intolerable affront to egalitarian ideals, because not everyone could go there, so they were replaced by comprehensive schools. The idea of education as an end in itself was ignored or derided.

Similar damage occurs in universities when they fall into the hands of managers who care nothing for scholarship, but seek to justify their salaries by manipulating the admissions system in order to demonstrate progress towards an unattainable equality.

Sandel, to his credit, is appalled by the rise of the meritocracy, the term coined in 1958 by Michael Young to describe the emergence of a new ruling class which derives its sense of entitlement from its superior intelligence and training.

As Sandel says to Piketty:

“Suppose we could somehow create genuinely fair equality of opportunity for admissions in the educational system, and for that matter in the economy. Suppose we could do that. Then, with a perfect meritocracy, would we have a just society? I don’t think so. That’s because meritocracy, even a perfectly realised meritocracy, has a dark side: it’s corrosive of the common good. And the reason it’s corrosive of the common good is that it encourages the successful to view their success as their own doing, to inhale too deeply of their own success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way…”

The Democratic Party in the United States, the Labour Party in Britain and the Socialist Party in France have become “more identified with the values, interests, and outlook of the well-educated, credentialed, professional classes that with the working-class voters who once constituted their primary base”.

There has been, Sandel observes, “an angry backlash” against this kind of politics. Piketty says that “what’s so brutal with the contemporary ideology of inequality is this way of celebrating the winners and blaming the losers”.

He even thinks things may have been better in the past:

“In past regimes, inequality could be very brutal, but you had the feeling that there was a sort of complementarity between the different social groups. Some people are nobles and warriors; some people are workers and peasants, and they’re not necessarily stupid. We just need these different groups.”

Sandel objects to “the misplaced hope that markets can spare us from debating and deciding contested questions about the common good”.

He wants us to focus more on “the dignity of work”, and on the good done by people whether or not they have a university degree.

But he has no idea how this can be achieved, and greets Piketty’s call for “federal internationalist socialism…some kind of United States of the World with progressive taxation” with polite incredulity.

Sandel has earlier observed that very few members of the working class sit in the British Parliament. He could have added that there used to be many more working-class MPs, who got their political education as trade unionists, entered the Commons as Labour MPs, and could be found wielding power in every Labour government.

Why is this kind of MP almost extinct? Mainly because he or she would nowadays be spotted in childhood, at a reasonably good state school, and would be sent to university. Greater educational equality has led towards the meritocracy deplored by Young and Sandel.

Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in the 1830s in Democracy in America,

“Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy.”

Almost two centuries later, the Right remains as confused as the Left about how to respond to this passion for equality. Few are brave and realistic enough to say, as Maurice Cowling did in 1978 in Conservative Essays, that the Conservative conception of freedom is one that

“will maintain existing inequalities or restore lost ones, so far as political action can do this. And this is wanted not only by those who benefit from inequalities of wealth, rank and education but also by the enormous numbers who, while not partaking in the benefits, recognise that inequalities exist, and in some obscure sense assume that they ought to. They assume, that is to say, that a nation has to be stratified and that stratification entails privilege; and they assume this not as a matter of principle but because it is something to which they are accustomed.”

When the Labour Party flirted with the idea of a mansion tax, how terrified those Labour supporters who lived in mansions, or at least in valuable town houses, became. They too, it turned out, wished to preserve existing inequalities.

Our politicians find themselves with the tricky task of promoting, or pretending to promote, equality, while in practice preserving existing inequalities.

The National Health Service remains free at the point of use, a sanctified symbol of equality, but those who can afford to do so buy treatments which are not available on the NHS, or for which there would be a long wait.

Our planning system is devoted to the preservation of existing inequalities.

We are equal under the law, but some of us can afford good lawyers.

This is not a good book, but at least it is short, and makes one think about a subject coated in hypocrisy and self-deception.