Inequality in Canada : the history and politics of an idea /
"Economic inequality is one of the great issues of our era. But what is inequality? Eric Sager argues that inequality is more than the distribution of income and wealth. Inequality is the idea that there are wide gaps between rich and poor, that the gaps are both an economic problem and a socia...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Montreal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago :
McGill-Queen's University Press,
[2020]
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| Series: | McGill-Queen's studies in the history of ideas ;
81 McGill-Queen's studies in the history of ideas 81 |
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| Summary: | "Economic inequality is one of the great issues of our era. But what is inequality? Eric Sager argues that inequality is more than the distribution of income and wealth. Inequality is the idea that there are wide gaps between rich and poor, that the gaps are both an economic problem and a social injustice, and that the problem can be either eliminated or reduced. This idea arose in a transatlantic world, in the long evolution of political economy in Britain and the United States from classical economics to the emerging welfare economics of the twentieth century. Within this transatlantic frame inequality took a distinct form in Canada. It appeared among radical reformers and republicans in the 1830s. It arose in a critique of wealth among Protestant thinkers and their moral imperatives. The idea appeared among labour radicals and reformers who interpreted the conflict between capital and labour as a problem of distribution. For social gospelers inequality was a simplifying frame that made sense of an alien modernity of industry, urbanism, and class conflict. A tradition of idealist thought persisted in the twentieth century, sustaining the idea of inequality despite deep silences among Canadian economists. The idea appeared forcefully in social Catholicism in Quebec, and then waned in the political and intellectual justifications of the social security state. In the new era of inequality in our century, a political solution may rest upon the recovery of an older ethical idealism and in a historically-informed egalitarian politics."-- |
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| Physical Description: | xiv, 468 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm Issued also in electronic format |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 319-453) and index |
| ISBN: | 0228005795 0228005809 9780228005797 9780228005803 |