| Series |
McGill-Queeńs studies in the history of ideas
McGill-Queen's studies in the history of ideas ; 81. ^A664133
|
| Contents |
North Atlantic Thinkers on the Problem of Inequality (1770s-1920s) -- First Sightings of Inequality in the Canadian Colonies (1790s-1830s) -- Emerging Protestant Critiques of Wealth (1830s-1880s) -- Labour Voices, Worker Intellectuals, and the Politics of Immanence (1870-1920) -- Spiritual Engineering from Rural Romantics to Social Gospellers (1900s-1930) -- Silence and Scope of English-Canadian Political Economy (1880-1920) -- Force and Frailty of Quebećs Social Catholicism (1930s-1950s) -- Idealism, Equality, and the End of Inequality (1920-1945) -- Fractured Echoes of Inequality in the Welfare Era (1940s-1960s). |
| Abstract |
"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."-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages [319]-453) and index. |
| Other forms | Issued also in electronic format. |
| Issued in other form | Online version: Sager, Eric W., 1946- Inequality in Canada. Montreal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago : McGill-Queeńs University Press, 2021 0228005957 9780228005957 |
| Genre/form | History. |
| ISBN | 9780228005803 |
| ISBN | 9780228005797 (cloth) |
| ISBN | 0228005795 |
| ISBN | 0228005809 |
