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The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.
(perhaps much as Oscar Wilde declared he was an advocate of socialism because he didn’t like having to look at poor people or listen to their stories).
In conclusion, he swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest:
were they genuine traces of ancient practices, or recent revivals and reinventions? Or revivals of traces? Or traces of revivals? It’s
‘we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.’
Until around a half-millennium ago, a large proportion of the world’s population still lived either beyond the tax collector’s purview or within reach of some relatively straightforward means of escaping it.5
We started out by observing that to inquire after the origins of inequality necessarily means creating a myth, a fall from grace, a technological transposition of the first chapters of the Book of Genesis
