David Lay Williams on the Campbell Conversations

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David Lay Williams, professor of political science at DePaul University, talks about his book, "The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx."

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Economic inequality has been a perennial issue in political campaigns and we are said to be living right now in another Gilded Age of extreme inequality. My guest today is David Lay Williams. He's a professor of political science at DePaul University and the author of a new book titled, “The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shapes Political Thought from Plato to Marx.” Professor Williams, welcome to the program and congratulations on this new book.

David Lay Williams: Thanks so much for inviting me. Grant, I'm looking forward to our conversation.

GR: Well, me too. So let me just start with something really basic. It's right there in the title “The Greatest of All Plagues.” It's kind of a provocative phrase there. Where does that come from? What's its significance?

DLW: So it's actually a phrase from the first figure I treat in my book, Plato, who would be familiar, I'm sure, to many. Plato was probably, you know, the first systematic thinker on politics in Western political tradition. But he's also the first one to seriously engage the question of inequality. And he introduces this phrase in his last dialogue, called The Laws. And he has a character speaking, a character he calls the Athenian stranger who says that whenever you have a wealth divided, extremely to the rich on one hand and the poor on the other, and not very much in the middle, it leads to serious problems, including strife, civil strife and even civil war, which he calls the greatest of all plagues. So technically, he says it's still as civil strife and civil war that's the greatest of all plagues. But what brings that about is economic inequality.

GR: And that sort of reminds me a little bit of what I remember from Aristotle, too, about the, you know, this idea of sort of a basic balance, and it can't get too far out of balance. Was there a way that the ancient thinkers as a whole tended to think about inequality? I mean, obviously, the societies they lived in were very heavily layered and different ways. But is there sort of an ancient way of thinking about this or were they all over the place?

DLW: A bit all over the place. Right. They're certainly very serious critics of inequality in the ancient world. Plato being one. Aristotle's certainly talks about inequality as being very problematic for managing a polis. But there are others who seem more comfortable with it that there's a figure known as old oligarch to ancient scholars who unsurprisingly likes being an oligarch and talks about how all political power needs to be concentrated in the hands of the rich few. So but but I will say that it's not unusual to find opposition to inequality, not just in ancient Greece, but you can certainly find it in Rome, and you can certainly find it, as I discuss in chapter two of my book in Rome and Palestine, or, you know, what some people now call Israel. Right. So there was I, we can sort of say there was widespread opposition to our concern about inequality in the ancient world.

GR: Hmm. And one of your central arguments is that the problem of inequality, the issue of inequality, drives much of the thought of political philosophy over the centuries. It's one of the main through lines. And I just wonder if you could elaborate a little bit on that idea, that notion.

DLW: Through lines, I'm sorry, in the ancient world or through lines?

GR: Throughout.

DLW: Yes. Yes, sure. Yeah.

GR: Throughout Western political thought.

DLW: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So there's several threads that I kind of pull through, I used to connect, like many of the thinkers in the book, right. One of those through lines is the role of what the Greeks call pleonexia. And that's, it's an ancient Greek word, which means greed, but kind of greed on steroids, as it were. It's a greed incapable of being satiated. Plato called…

GR: Gee, cause we never see that now.

DLW: No! So Plato, in his dialogue, The Gorgias, compares pleonectic souls with a leaky jug. He says, you know, you can they can spend all day pouring more water into a leaky jug, and will never be satisfied with the amount of water that you give it. In fact, the more water you give it, the more it wants. And he says many souls are like this. The souls that he characterized characterizes as as disease or pathological. And there are typically three things that pleonectic souls want, and this includes power, adulation, and especially money. And that's, of course, the connection to inequality. And it's why societies tend unless, you know, checked by policy, societies tend to revert to inequality because they're just going to be people out there who will never be satisfied with the amount of money that they have and will do practically anything to get it. So that starts in the ancient world. But interestingly, that really weaves its way through the tradition. Right. Certainly, we find lots of condemnations of greed. And specifically, you know, they the Greek New Testament uses the word pleonexia to condemn greed. But it's also found in the Old Testament. The book of Ecclesiastes is full of condemnations of pleonexia. Right. But this goes all the way through. It's in Thomas Hobbes. It's in John Stuart Mill. And even in Karl Marx. Yeah. So that's one thread that works its way through. Another thread, and maybe I'll stop it at two, for now, to leave time for questions, right. But another thread is kind of the damage that concentrated wealth inflicts upon the faculty, our human capacity for empathy. Right. And this really starts in the Bible. This is in the New Testament account, in the book of, in the Gospel of Luke and the story of Lazarus. Not the one risen from the dead. There's actually two Lazaruses in the Bible. It's the Lazarus, the beggar who asks a rich man for money, just asking for crumbs, actually, from his table. The rich man refuses. And then Jesus intervenes at that point to say, well, let me tell you how this ends up. Lazarus goes to heaven. The rich guy goes to hell because he had no capacity for empathy, for feeling for the poor and much less doing anything about it. And this inability to feel for the plight of the poor on the part of the rich is, again, a theme that we see throughout Western civilization, most notably, and maybe surprisingly for some, in the figure of Adam Smith, often cited as a godfather of capitalism. Adam Smith on page two of “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” his second most famous book, after “Wealth of Nations,” provides an evocative account of a begging man who was ignored, that nobody feels any sympathy for. So those are two examples of themes that connected to inequality that really worked their way from the ancient world to the modern.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with the political science professor David Lay Williams, and we're discussing his new book, “The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato to Marx.” So, you know, you've got a you've got a big handful of but it's still just a handful of philosophers here that you treat in your book. You obviously have to make some difficult choices to narrow it down. I'm just curious how did you pick the people that you did, you don’t have to go through each one. I'm going to ask you a couple of specific questions about individuals, but just what were your methods like or how did you go about deciding this person versus another person?

DLW: Yeah. Well, you know, I should begin with some honesty, right? I mean, I certainly included some people because I just really love reading and thinking about them, right.

GR: That's OK.

DLW: I've written a couple of books on Rousseau. You know, I certainly wanted to make room for him. And I do really love reading Plato. But beyond that, right, the more, you know, maybe justifiable explanation is that I really wanted to draw on very well known canonical figures to kind of make a point to say, look, if if people care about the Western canon and we hear this from from a lot of people on the political right these days, for that matter. Right. You know, why aren't we reading more of the Western canon? You know, why are we reading all the DEI stuff? Right. Well, you know, I want to take these people seriously because I you know, although maybe not a person of the right, I share their passion for these texts. Right. And I want to say to them, well, you know, if we take these texts seriously, you know, they say some pretty interesting things about inequality. Right. And if we're going to, you know, and certainly we're all engaged in the question of inequality today. Right. It's coming up this week with the budget. And, you know, if we're going to look to figures like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and, you know, Plato and the Bible. Right. Among other sources. Right. I think, you know, these canonical texts have a lot to say about this issue and can be the source of some, you know, stimulating and perhaps important discussions.

GR: Mm hmm. And it was you've already mentioned this a bit earlier in our conversation, but I found it very intriguing, maybe a little surprising. I don't know. But when I first opened the book and I saw that the New Testament was one of your chapters right there, along with Plato and Marx and Rousseau.

DLW: Yeah.

GR: And it makes sense, you know, when you think about the Gospels and you've talked a little bit about the view of inequality that the New Testament offers, maybe this is a time to work in your third through line that you didn't that you left out before. But, you know, there's this theme of greed. There's this interesting theme of empathy being damaged or destroyed. Is there an overarching lesson about inequality that you think the New Testament is teaching us?

DLW: Sure. Right. And the New Testament is really unique, obviously, in this book. Right. You know, Jesus is not typically taught as a political thinker in political science departments at universities, whether that's Syracuse or DePaul or Harvard or wherever. Right. I and I didn't even intend to write one on the New Testament. That wasn't my intention. My problem was that I had a big gap between Plato and Thomas Hobbes and I and I started reading some Christian thinkers a little bit later than the Bible, of course. And the more I read them, the more I thought, well, I should really go back and look at the Bible. And I realized that that's what I had to write about, because the Bible has so much to say about this. And, you know, interesting things, you know, that come from the Bible. Right. I'll focus on two important laws. These are in the Hebrew Bible. Actually, they're in the books of Moses, the you know, the Pentateuch. Right. And it's that they're very important laws, according to Moses. Right. And they're laws that Jesus draws our attention to again, in the Gospels. And these two laws are the laws of sabbatical and jubilee and the law of sabbatical and again, an ancient Hebrew law that says all debts should be forgiven once every seven years. Right. Among other things. Right. A jubilee is the seventh of every sabbatical years. Right. So once every fortnight or 50 years. Right. It's kind of gotten rounded up to 50. And in a jubilee year, you do you forgive all the debts and these other things as well. But you also have to return all property that's that's changed hands over the last five decades back to the original equitable distribution. Right. And when Jesus is setting up his ministry, he's preaching, he announces very specifically, it is the year, it is the year of the Lord, which is a Jubilee year. Right. And when you think about the context in which Jesus is, you know, ministering to the poor. Right. This is a very powerful and appealing message. Right. You know, “Hey, you know, we would like our land back. We would like our debts forgiven.” And there was a significant debt crisis in Roman Palestine at that time. And this message was extremely appealing.

GR: Hmm. Also, cueing a student loan forgiveness.

DLW: Yes. And people have made that connection.

GR: You're listening to The Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with David Lay Williams. He's a political science professor at DePaul University and the author of a new book titled “The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato to Marx.” And we've been discussing his book. So I, I've read in my past all the writers that you treat, including the Gospels, spent, you know, two months slogging through Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital.” I've done my duty there, too. But I find Rousseau the most intriguing of the political philosophers that you cover. So I'm going to take a personal indulgence here. Tell us a little bit about his views on inequality.

DLW: Sure. Rousseau is obviously a really important thinker when it comes to inequality. I famously he wrote a book called the “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.” And he's certainly the first modern thinker to think about inequality in a very systematic way, gives an account of where it comes from and why it's problematic in that discourse. And then and in other writings beyond his discourse, inequality talks about what he thinks could be done about it, has some a variety of interesting proposals. But I think what's really distinctive among the many things that Rousseau says about inequality is it is in the context of his enlightenment culture, of emerging meritocracy. I think this is where Rousseau really speaks to us. Right? Again, meritocracy is a word in the contemporary discourse about politics right there. Politicians are saying you know, universities need to be more meritocratic. Corporations should hire on a meritocratic basis. Right. But Rizzo's kind of he's and he's Rousseau was well aware of this emerging culture of meritocracy, because that's what's happening in the Enlightenment. And there are lots of good things, of course, about encouraging, you know, people to cultivate and develop their talent and use that for the public good. But Rousseau also thought there were problems with that. Right. So and it's maybe useful to think about, you know, kind of a capitalist economy versus a feudal economy. Right. And nobody wants to go back to feudalism. But Rousseau says, imagine, Rousseau invites us to think, you know, about, you know, the moral psychology of people under feudalism. Right? If you're poor in a futile economy, you're you don't have to, like, spend time thinking about why you're poor. You know why you're poor. It's because your parents were poor. And it's no reflection on you, you know, or your talents or your efforts or any of that. And the same thing if you're rich, right? If you're rich, it's not like you deserved it. You know that. You just you know that you're rich because you inherited your money. Right. And you're you're estate. Right. You know, in the case of the nobles. Right. But you move to a market economy, and there's a very significant psychological shift. Right. Because now if you're poor, it's because you're not smart like the rich people, or you didn't try hard. Right. Like the rich people. Right. In, you know, more colloquial terms, it's because you're lazy and stupid. Right. And if you're rich, by contrast, it means, boy, are you smart. Boy, are you a hard worker, and you deserve all the money you can get. Right. And the richer you are, that just means that you're all the better a person. Right. And Rousseau thinks, honestly, that this is this is dangerous, maybe even perverse, because he wants people to focus on their moral character. Right. Not focusing about how great they are. Right. Or focusing, by contrast, on how terrible they are for the reason that they're poor, which has nothing to do with their character as far as Rousseau is concerned. In fact, probably is a point in their favor. So Rousseau points out just how pathological he thinks this is, and he really wants us to kind of get our get our values back in order in an unequal world, which he thinks could be best achieved by reducing that inequality. Right. Because, you know, that's how we can reduce, you know, kind of the demoralizing effect on the poor and this kind of entitled effect among the rich.

GR: Now, very very prescient psychologically. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher. And my guest is the political science professor David Lay Williams. So, thinking about Rousseau, but I want to ask a more general point. But thinking about Rousseau, there's obviously a lot of contradictions and hypocrisies between a lot of Rousseau’s writings and Rousseau’s actual life. I've read a couple of biographies of him, and I think that makes him more interesting, actually. But in writing this book, did you come to any general conclusions about the relationship between the life experiences of these thinkers and then what they have to say? Any sense of influence?

DLW: Yeah. You know, I it's interesting to reflect on that. I certainly one thing I do in the book is I try to put each thinker in a historical context. Right. To explain why they might have been interested in inequality. Right. But I think your question is even more specific than that. What about the specific life experiences and maybe the background of each thinker? Right. And you mentioned even the possibility of hypocrisies. Right. And on this account, we might look to the first figure in the book, again, Plato, who has all kinds of problems with rich people and says, you know, it's impossible to be both rich and virtuous at the same time. Plato, it turns out, was rich (overlapping laughter). He was very rich. And, you know, it's interesting to reflect on that. Right. Was Plato saying I'm a bad person? Was Plato saying I'm the exception? Right. He doesn't tell us. Right. I mean, I think what we you know, you people are free to, you know, draw from these facts however they want. I think maybe kind of the most you know, I think what I'm comfortable in drawing on from this is that Plato did spend a lot of time around a lot of other rich people. Right. And, you know, and many of them, of course, were relatives like his Uncle Critias was one of the tyrants of Athens imposed on Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War, a brutal murderer. Right. So it's not unreasonable to think that. Well, maybe Plato's experience growing up around a lot of rich people actually informed his understanding of rich people. And maybe he had a better angle on that than some others who maybe didn't grow up under those circumstances.

GR: Hmm. So you've obviously thought deeply about all of these thinkers that are in your book. Is there one that you think has it most right when it comes to inequality? Can you pick one that way?

DLW: Right. That's a real tough question to answer. Right. And might be taking the cheap way out, because I think every one of them has some handle on an important truth in the way they approach this. So I'm not going to pick a single one. But what I can point to is that there's you know, there's certainly a pattern among some of the thinkers who say you kind of draw distinction. And this is true, I think, in Plato very expressly and Rousseau more implicitly, that for them, this kind of a radical opposition, a radical a path of radical reform and a path of moderate reform. Right. Right. They both say, look, ideally we should be, you know, a very equal and not completely equal. Nobody argues for perfect equality, not even Marx, for that matter. Should make that clear. And Plato says, ideally, the rich people should have no more than four times the wealth of the poorest, for example. But he says, look, you know, that's that's if you're creating a new society from scratch, I guess. And he's saying that in the context of establishing a colony in a territory that's never been occupied before, he said do it this way. But he says, look, if you're writing laws for, you know, a political entity that already exists and already has that's distributed a lot of property is like, no, you can't do that. Without killing a lot of people. Right. And maybe some people are open to that solution. Right. But Plato doesn't love that and says, look, you know, you still have to get more equal than you are and you need to work on it consistently. But he also says that ideally, what you want to do is try to get buy-in if at least some people find some people who are rich and feel guilty about it. Right. And have them do some of the hard work of persuading their friends and colleagues and business partners to realize, you know, it's not the worst thing to have their taxes raised and to build schools and, you know, and other public entities for people who are less fortunate than them. Right. And to kind of work toward a greater equality. Right. And I, you know, I, I like, you know, contemplating the idea that there are moderate paths forward. Right. Because, you know, the other path, you know, at the polar opposite end of the book is Marx. Right. And Marx, you know, fundamentally just kind of concludes that, you know, rich people aren’t going to give up their money without a fight. Right. And you just need to come prepared to fight. And, you know and, you know, I can't you know, I don't, maybe Marx is right. I don't know. There are scholars who certainly think that Marx is. I'd like to hope there's another path available. I'd like to hope that people are persuadable. Yeah.

GR: So we only have about a minute left, and I wanted to squeeze this last question in, and I think you kind of are already answering it, but I'll give you another few seconds to add on to it. And that is obviously, you have thought a lot about inequality as a social issue and a social problem very deeply. What would you do if you were one of Plato's philosopher kings, or to use a phrase that's out there, maybe dictator for a day, to address inequality through policy change? What policy changes would you recommend? In about a minute. I'm sorry. I'm sure that's a more complicated question.

DLW: Yeah. So I'll try to do this quickly with a reference I think I haven't mentioned before, but John Stuart Mill has a wonderful range of policy proposals for addressing this. Things like having more co-ops, like worker co-ops, you know, businesses owned by workers, will lead to a more equal distribution. Honestly, you know, estate or inheritance taxes, you know, on fortunes over X amount of money. Right. These things should be politically doable. Right. In a democracy. Right. The will is, you know, I think there for things like that, and we just need to find politicians with enough courage, I think, to seriously pursue them.

GR: Hmm. We'll have to leave it there. That was David Lay Williams and again, his new book is titled “The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato to Marx.” If you've heard of some of those guys and you want to learn a bit more about what they have to say, or if you have concerns about economic inequality and want some deeper grounding, this book is a great choice for you. I want to emphasize that it is not an arcane work of political philosophy. It's extremely readable and it's an enjoyable read. David, thanks again for making the time to talk. Great book. Thanks a lot.

DLW: My pleasure.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

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