Be careful what you wish for, historian Walter Scheidel writes: the suppression of inequality was, on the historical evidence, “only ever brought forth in sorrow”. In a scholarly and ambitious book, Scheidel argues that economic inequalities are usually narrowed most effectively as a result of cataclysmic events: war, revolution, the collapse of states and natural disasters.

Scheidel dubs these the “four horsemen” and explores the causal relationships between them and the emergence of mechanisms that significantly redistribute wealth – not just in the societies we think we know, such as western European modernity, but those we rarely consider, such as the pre-conquest Americas, or the dark ages in Europe.

Scheidel’s starting point is welcome: the ways we currently measure inequality are inadequate. The Gini coefficient does not properly measure the incomes of the extremely rich; and the existence of vast, offshore wealth reserves hides the true extremes of wealth inequality. Even on the official measures, wealth concentration is proceeding rapidly – with the number of billionaires controlling the equivalent of half the world’s wealth shrinking from a few hundred to a coachload in less than a decade.

There is, despite this, still a long way to go: the escalating wealth share of the top 1% in the US has only just reached where it was in 1929. And the ratio of Bill Gates’s wealth pile to that of the average US citizen is roughly the same as that of the richest Roman aristocrats in AD400. Scheidel observes that, left to their own devices, most societies – including ancient Rome – seem to reach a demographic and technological limit of inequality. What reverses this is violence – and not just ordinary violence.

“Only specific types of violence have consistently forced down inequality,” Scheidel writes. War has to be total; revolution has to be ultraviolent and socially pervasive; state failure has to lead to violence so intense that “it wipes the slate clean”. Ditto the social effects of pandemics.

This account of the emergence of systemic inequality follows the classic materialist schema: only with the emergence of a durable economic surplus in early societies do you get archaeological evidence of inequality – that is where social status begins to map on to economic status. States, defensible and transferable forms of wealth, hereditary elites and the rituals to endow them with status emerge together, Scheidel’s review of the evidence shows, to create the “original 1%” – from Mesopotamia to the Aztec elite, who wore “feather work and jade ornaments, lived in two-storey houses, ate the flesh of human sacrifices, drank chocolate … kept concubines … and did not pay taxes”.

Observed in the long run, the last 2,000 years produced “twin peaks” of inequality after the original ancient empires collapsed: medieval society on the eve of the Black Death, and modern society on the eve of the first world war. The wipeout of a third of Europe’s population through plague – mirrored in South America by genocidal depopulation – actually suppressed inequality, by raising the price of labour.

The loss of a third of Europe’s people in the Black Death actually reduced inequality by raising the price of labour

But, says Scheidel, it is the modern “Great Compression” – starting with the 1914-18 war and ending with Thatcherism – that holds the biggest implications for future social justice. His argument, a companion to that of Thomas Piketty, is that the reductions of inequality achieved by welfare states, communist revolutions and confiscatory taxes required by world wars were one-offs.

Marketised industrial societies that do not experience revolution, catastrophe or total war are prone to generating the high levels of inequality we are currently approaching. Scheidel concludes that these catastrophic levellers are “gone for now, and unlikely to return any time soon. This casts doubt on the feasibility of future levelling.”

I believe that, on the contrary, it is possible to use the same evidence Scheidel marshals to propose an alternative reading, in which the second of the “twin peaks” turns out to be the last.

First: the proletariat of early industrial societies did turn out to be a different kind of historical subject from all other oppressed classes. Its early revolutions were violently redistributive for the very reason Marx outlined: it had no stake in society but had the means to mobilise itself independent of demagogic factions of the elite. It achieved agency.

Massive temporary suppression of inequality … Havana, 1959, during the early days of the Cuban revolution. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

As a result, the needs of predatory states and elites changed. In order to persuade the proletariat to go to war, they had to suppress hereditary wealth and indeed confiscate wealth. Where their legitimacy collapsed – as in Russia, China, Cuba and post-1945 eastern Europe – massive temporary suppression of inequality was the outcome, however pitifully stagnant the Comecon countries of 1945-89 became.

But between these two realities grew social democracy – which is actually something very new in history, if placed between the extremes documented in Scheidel’s book. Social democracy wishes to suppress inequality in a controlled, consensual way, using the very state the elite has fashioned to entrench it; heading off pestilence, state failure and violent revolution. The vast wealth being generated in the highly technologically efficient society of the 21st century must, contrary to Scheidel, offer the possibility of an even greater redistributional space in which social democracy can operate.

The only problem is, for 30 years, social democracy lost the will to redistribute (other than upwards to its allies in the yachting and mafia fraternities). Since around 2011, with the mass revolts of technologically empowered and educated people, the world has been offered the possibility of a break from the cycle of relentless inequality. In effect it turned the offer down – and in saying no to a future of social justice it has, for now, opened the door to the past: to kleptocrats, mafiosi, politicians whose imaginations are trapped in that tight space between the golden tower and the golden shower.

When the youth of Europe and America went to the streets saying “we are unstoppable, another world is possible”, in the long run they were right. Only if we accept that the social dynamics of the Aztecs and Mesopotamian elites can coexist with mass access to information and human rights should we adopt the pessimism whose premise pervades this book. I refuse to.

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