The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel (review)

In recent years, experts in the social sciences and humanities have rushed around our suppurating political body, offering prescriptions. They all agree on the name of the disease – inequality – but they disagree about the causes and the remedy. Now historian Walter Scheidel has entered this conference, perhaps not so much as doctor but as undertaker. For his diagnosis is the gloomiest of all: to meaningfully reduce inequality requires shattering violence, a cure so drastic many would opt to live with the disease.

Scheidel argues this in his impressive new book, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. According to Scheidel, inequality is literally in our dna, with humans being descended from more hierarchical and aggressive primate lines. In Part I, Scheidel reviews global economic development, concluding that the production of surpluses was inevitably accompanied by the rise of predatory elites who leveraged wealth and political connections to hive off ever-greater proportions of their society's outputs.

Scheidel opts not to engage the question of whether these unequal societies, as Marx might have it, inevitably sow the seeds of their own destruction through their perpetuation of inequality. Instead, he's concerned with how, in history, inequality has been meaningfully levelled. He claims, over the book's final 350 pages, that only violent shocks have levelled inequality. Scheidel attributes almost every single example of shrinking inequality to one of his "four horsemen" of levelling: total war that engages all aspects of society, such as the experience of Allied and Axis powers during the Second World War; state collapse, for example the fate of Classic Mayan civilization or late 20th-century Somalia; transformative revolution, as experienced in the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China; or pandemics, for example the Black Death's equalizing impact on much of Europe.

The amount of research Scheidel marshals in support of this argument is impressive. For each leveler, he presents dozens of examples, darting back and forth in time between every era of human history and all over the globe. Along the way, any reader is sure to find much of interest and relevance. In my case, I found Scheidel's analysis of the relationship between citizenship, military obligations, warfare, and inequality in ancient Greek city-states to be fascinating and revealing. However, taken as a whole, the frequent jumps in time and place can be disorienting, and Scheidel's presentation of example after example can bog down the reader. The sections where Scheidel is able to dig deeper and present a more sustained account of societal violence, such as his section on the Russian Revolution and civil war, are invariably more engaging.

However, it is ironic that a book in some respects so exhaustive suffers from being too narrow. On its face, Scheidel's argument is convincing and compelling. Solely focusing on the relationship between violence and levelling allows Scheidel to demonstrate that instances of societal levelling invariably are linked to violent shocks. However almost all times and places are marked by violence full-stop. Scheidel's focus only on levelling violence distorts our understanding of violence and of inequality in several important ways. The connection between the two is not considered in sufficient detail; so, while we get a revealing and thorough explanation of the extraordinarily violent consequences of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, their targeting of rich peasants, and their program of forced agricultural collectivization, the violence of the post-Cold War institution of rapacious capitalism is not even mentioned. This despite Russia experiencing a globally unprecedented peacetime depopulation between 1992 and 2009 – its population declining by 5 per cent – a phenomenon anthropologist Michelle Parsons connects to the social and economic fracturing that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet system and its replacement by capitalism. Nor does Scheidel consider any of the myriad forms of...