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Anomalies and Continuities: Positivism and Historicism on Inequality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2020

Gabriel Winant
Gabriel Winant*
Affiliation:
The University of Chicago
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: gwinant@uchicago.edu
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Abstract

The idea of a “new gilded age” depends on a model of history in which the tension between inequality and solidarity takes the form of a binary oscillation (often resting on a positivist social scientific form of reasoning), in turn creating the appearance of basic similarity between separate unequal periods. Under this view, however, it is difficult to make sense of the fundamentally different origins of inequality prevailing in 1890 and 2010. Instead, this article argues, historians ought to treat history cumulatively—that is, historically—finding the origins of inequality not in the previous unequal period, but in the previous solidaristic period, and tracing the connections between one period and another rather than viewing them as ideal-typical opposites.

Type
Special Issue: A Second Gilded Age?
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 285 - 295
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) 2020

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References

Notes

1 For a very early occurrence, see the 1981 editorial in The New Republic opposing Reagan's tax program: “The New Gilded Age,” The New Republic, Aug. 15, 1981, 5–6. A landmark in social science is Goldin, Claudia and Margo, Robert A., “The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-Century,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 107 (Feb. 1992), 1–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The New Yorker published a collection of essays entitled The New Gilded Age in 2001, but it did not contain the word “inequality”—its contents described wealth, but largely ignored its concomitant poverty. Remnick, David, ed., The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at an Age of Affluence (New York: Random House, 2000)Google Scholar. Similarly in 1995, Thomas Frank sounded off in The Baffler against the “new Gilded Age,” but the critique targeted capitalism's supposed corruption of the culture industries (Rupert Murdoch as the new William Randolph Hearst, etc.), rather than the widening social divide. The essay is reprinted in Frank, Thomas and Weiland, Matt, eds., Commodify Your Dissent: The Business of Culture in the New Gilded Age—Salvos from the Baffler (New York: Norton, 1997), 23–28Google Scholar.

2 Alan Greenspan, “Income Inequality: Issues and Policy Options,” Aug. 28, 1998, at symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, WY; Posner, Richard A., “Equality, Wealth, and Political Stability,” The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 13 (Oct. 1997), 344–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. James Livingston surveys this history in “The Myth of a Second Gilded Age,” Chronicle Review, Jan. 31, 2016.

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