The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

Extract

This text, looking to identify and problematize the “challenge of inequality” for society today through undertaking a global history of inequality from the Stone Age to the present, is very much one of our time, and arguably one for our time. It can be aligned persuasively with how an intensifying concern about social and actually human dimensions of key societal institutions—especially economic and political ones—has followed the “first crisis of globalisation” (Gordon Brown, Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalisation [2010]) and new discursive spaces have emerged to support analyses that stand apart from traditional economics or primarily economics-oriented approaches.