A Financial Times Best Book of the Year. A sweeping and original history of how economists
across two centuries have thought about inequality told through portraits of six key figures.
"How do you see income distribution in your time and how and why do you expect it to change?"
That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential
economists: François Quesnay Adam Smith David Ricardo Karl Marx Vilfredo Pareto and Simon
Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives he charts the evolution of thinking
about inequality showing just how much views have varied among ages and societies. Indeed
Milanovic argues we cannot speak of "inequality" as a general concept: any analysis of it is
inextricably linked to a particular time and place. Visions of Inequality takes us from
Quesnay and the physiocrats for whom social classes were prescribed by law through the
classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith Ricardo and Marx who saw class as a purely
economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a
matter of elites versus the rest of the population while Kuznets saw inequality arising from
the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold
War before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today.
Meticulously extracting each author's view of income distribution from their often voluminous
writings Milanovic offers an invaluable genealogy of the discourse surrounding inequality.
These intellectual portraits are infused not only with a deep understanding of economic theory
but also with psychological nuance reconstructing each thinker's outlook given what was
knowable to them within their historical contexts and methodologies.
