Equality in the Age of Singularity

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Notes

1. In the United States, the top 10% of the population now enjoy greater and greater incomes and accumulated wealth (35% of total pretax income in 1982, 50% by 2010). The wealth of the top 1% is even more staggering (20% of pretax income by 2012; double what it was in the 1980s). And, the extravagant income and wealth of the top sliver of this 1% is truly astonishing (the top 25 hedge fund managers were paid $537 million in 2012). Simultaneously, the wages of most workers have barely risen; between 1973 and 2011, the median hourly compensation for workers rose only 11%, though productivity increased by 80%. France has seen similar trends. As Rosanvallon notes, the average income of the top 1% increased by 14% between 1998 and 2006, while the average income for the top 0.1% increased by nearly 100%. During this same period, income for the bottom 90% increased only 4%.

2. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).

3. This quote is from a recent article by Rosanvallon, “The Society of Equals: Restoring Democratic Equality in Relations,” Juncture 20.4 (Spring 2014).

4. Rosanvallon claims that the individuality of the Revolutionary era did not “fuel a process of differentiation leading to an atomization, division, or segmentation of society, nor was it a vector of particularism” (224). This underestimates, I believe, the divisive aspects of the revolutionary experience, which also contributed to what in the early nineteenth century was termed “individualism.”

5. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).

6. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983).