7 The Politics of Inequality
In the presence of an effective government, politics as usual involves
both exploitation and opportunity hoarding. Since generations of anarchists
and libertarians have railed against it, the exploitative side of government
comes easily into view. Ruling classes use government-controlled
means and resources to extract surplus value from the efforts of
categorically excluded subject populations, redirecting at least some of
the surplus to activities from which the subject population does notbenefit,
although the ruling classes do. Taxes and conscription represent two
obvious forms of extraction, colonial wars and promotion of ruling-class
businesses two obvious forms of diverted resources. The big question is
not whether exploitation happens, but who belongs to the ruling classes
and how they dispose of surplus value: on their own private enterprises,
on their own creature comforts, on war,on public goods.
In general, democrats prefer democracy because large parts of the
citizenry join the ruling classes and because, consequently, decision
193
194 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
makers are inclined to invest extracted surplus in public goods. On the
whole, democracies enforce distinctions between inclusion and exclusion
with as much energy as autocracies; recent moves by Western democracies
to exclude noncitizens from public benefits illustrate just such
exclusiveness. As compared with tyrannies and oligarchies, nevertheless,
democracies include far more of their populations in the ruling
classes and provide more regular channels for movement from exclusion
to inclusion.
Categorically organized opportunity hoarding likewise occurs
widely in politics, but less visibly than exploitation. Consider only two
examples: state enforcement of class-specific property rights and creation
of regional autonomies on the basis of ethnic distinctness. In the
first case, most historical states have given preference to the property
rights of landlords over those of peasants, herders, hunters, and gatherers
who live from the same land. In the second, systems of indirect rule
such as the Ottoman empire and Stalin's nationalities policy generally
give priority and state backing to one declared ethnicity within each
subunit. Under these circumstances, to be sure, at a regional scale opportunity
hoarding edges easily over into exploitation.
Some exploitative states, indeed, have made a business of promoting
opportunity hoarding for a consideration. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
French state pushed to an extreme the sale of privileges:
revenue-generating public offices, craft monopolies, powers to control
(and therefore to draw income from) musical performances, municipal
charters, mining rights, and much more. (See Henshall 1992; Kettering
1993; for the promotion of opportunity hoarding in other European
states, see, e.g., Adams 1994; Samuel Clark 1995; Gustafsson i994a,
i994b.) Holding a state-sold public office, for example, commonly entitled
the officeholder not only to collect a stipend from some stream of
state revenues but also to charge large fees for state-mandated services,
not to mention under-the-table pots de vin—gifts, tips, commissions, or
bribes, depending on your perspective. In these cases, the state treasury
typically collected a cash payment from the beneficiary as the privilege
began and loaned state power when necessary to exclude unauthorized
persons from competitive activities.
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 195
Under Louis XIV, the great regional administrators, the Intendants,
put significant shares of their effort into enticing, persuading, or coercing
rich men to buy such privileges. They also frequently forced less
rich members of guilds and municipal governments to make collective
payments for maintenance of their exclusive rights to govern, to gather
customary fees, or to exercise their trades. Coerced or not, privilegeholders
drew benefits from their state-backed exclusive access to circumscribed
sets of opportunities. In the process, state authorities reinforced
or created categorical inequality, most visibly by attaching noble
status to a wide range of purchased offices.
Even where they do not draw major revenues from the activity, all
contemporary states engage in some promotion of opportunity
hoarding. Licensing of professions always entails state-backed exclusion
of uncertified persons from the practice of those professions, while selective
recruitment of militaryveterans into certain occupationalniches has
a similar effect. In the name of public health, public safety, promotionof
enterprise, and protection of property, states repeatedly help favored
networks to establish exclusive control over valued resources.
Emulation and adaptation, in their turn, usually sustain governmentsupported
categorical inequality. Governments imitate other govern-
ments7
forms, including their forms of inequality. Citizens then adapt,
fashioning routines that facilitate their own individual and collective
projects. Since they set up routines that secure their survival, however
contingently, many citizens then start to condemn other citizens who
escape common obligations, even obligations to a recognizably exploitative
state. Only under great pressures such as those endured by the
South African state during the 19808 do those supports for the routine
politics of inequality begin to tremble.
Inequality's politics, then, simply constitutes a special case of inequality's
general operation. The special case consists of those situations in
which one of the parties is a government—that is, an organization controlling
the principal concentrated means of coercion within some substantial
territory. (As the earlier discussion of nationalism suggests, a
government is a state if it does not clearly fall under the jurisdictionof
another government and if it receives recognition from other relatively
196 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
autonomous governments.) The politics of inequality concerns the
involvement of governments in inequality-generating social processes.
But it also concerns the impact of inequality on governmental processes
and struggles for power over governments. That includes situations in
which contenders explicitly struggle over issues of inequality.
Four distinguishable questions therefore confront us:
When one of the partiesis a government, how do exploitation, opportunity
hoarding, emulation,and adaptationoperatein thecreation,
installation,maintenance,transformation, anddestruction
of paired and unequalcategories?
How do the character and extent of categorical inequality in an organization
or populationaffect its basic political processes?
Under what conditions,how,and with what possibleconsequences
does inequalityitself become an object of political
struggle?
Under what conditionsdo political struggleand/orgovernmental
action producesignificant changesin prevailing patternsof in-
equality?
I make no pretense of providing comprehensive answers to such large
questions here. I hope only to show that the framework slowly constructed
in previous chapters offers fresh perspectives on each of them.
Inequality-generating processes operate similarly whether or not one
of the parties is a government. Critical differences spring chiefly from
two defining features of governments: their organizational priority within
a defined territory and their control of concentrated coercive means. Organizational
priority helps to explain why governmental agents frequently
intervene, or at least hover, as third parties in nonstate relations
of exploitation or opportunity hoarding. Control of coercive means
helps to explain why the intervention of governmental agents often
makes a large difference to inequality and why people so regularly
struggle over state control of major resources. Governmental actions
guarantee or threaten a wide range of rights, including categoricallydifferentiated
property rights.
Since their emergence as distinct forms of social organization some
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 197
ten thousand years ago, states have always intervened in patterns of
inequality across the territories their rulers have controlled. Most of the
time, their agents have tried to maintain and reproduce existing inequalities,
notably those guaranteeing the dominance of their ruling classes
and sustaining supplies of essential state resources: money, weapons,
soldiers, food, transport, communications. Taxand tribute policies, military
conscription and requisitioning, and defense of the state's central
resource base—trade, for city-states and city-empires; agriculturalproperty,
for agrarian empires; flocks and grazing land, for states based on
pastoral economies; manufacturingand transport facilities, for states of
industrial capitalism—have generally assumed and reinforced existing
relations of inequality. In their armies, hospitals, and bureaucracies,
states have provided models for exploitation and opportunity hoarding
in nongovernmental organizations.
As they enact laws, states commonly create paired categories or put
their weight behind existing categoricalpairs. Marriage licenses underscore
the line between married and unmarried; birth certificates, the division
between legitimate and illegitimate; government-issued identity
cards, the separation between citizens and noncitizens; military discharge
papers, the border between veterans and nonveterans. On either
side of such a categoricalpartition, rights and duties differ significantly.
In most cases, the incorporation of categoricaldistinctions into law reinforces
existing structures of power and inequality.
Although states have often provided meager aid to their "deserving"
poor, have frequently attacked regional populations that resisted central
rule, have occasionally dispossessed churches and other wealthy institutions
in times of crisis, and have sometimes inadvertently undermined
their own supporters through military and fiscal policies, only under
mass democracy, with its pitting of numbers against other resources,
have many states deliberately sought to redistribute income, wealth, or
goods in ways that might alter existing relations of inequality. States,
then, significantly affect durable inequality, chiefly by reproducing its
existing forms.
States also serve as sites and instruments of exploitation and opportunity
hoarding. Every government sustains a polity, a set of relations
198 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
among actors who have routine, low-cost access to governmental
agents. Collectively, if unequally, polity members exercise control over
the government's resources. A thin version of polity membership consists
of citizenship: a publicly established set of mutual rights and obligations
linking the entire category of native-born and naturalized persons
to government agents. Observers customarily think of citizenship
as the affair of states, but exactly parallel phenomena of inclusion and
obligation appeared in European municipalities and other local units
long before any substantial national citizenships formed (Cerutti, Descimon,
and Prak 1995; Gustafsson i994a, i994b). Even today all but the
most centralized states tolerate (or even insist on) some forms ofcitizenship
below the national level. Almost all citizens of federal states such
as Switzerland, the United States, and Germany, for example, also belong
to at least one of their country's component units.
In addition to broad rights of protection from agents of outside states,
citizenship frequently entails obligations such as military service and
rights such as health benefits. Citizenship commonly occurs in multiple
degrees—all states having elections, for example, exclude smallchildren
and some certified incompetents from voting. In forty-six states of the
contemporary United States, a felony conviction disfranchises the convict
for his or her prison term, and in thirty-one states disfranchisement
extends to the period of parole or probation; because black men receive
felony convictions at much higher rates than the rest of the American
population, a full 14 percent of them currently lack the right to vote
(Butterfield 1997, 12). The larger categorical system to which citizenship
belongs typically includes further distinctions such as native-born
citizen/naturalized citizen/legal resident/illegal resident/legal visitor/
excluded foreigner. Such systems always include formal procedures to
transfer persons from one category to another.
Thicker versions of polity membership crosscut categories of citizenship;
they create standing for collective actors either in the form of
licensed organizations (the American Medical Association, the AFLCIO)
or institutionalized categories (the medical profession, organized
labor). Much political struggle centers on establishing, challenging,
maintaining, or exercising the claims of such categorically defined collective
actors. When those struggles gain ground, indeed, we frequently
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 199
witness corresponding alterations in the state's own structure, as when
cabinet-level departments of labor, women's affairs, environmental
problems, or health form to deal with the claims raised by their counterparts
among the polity members.
Since every inclusion entails some exclusion, these processes incorporate
categorical inequality into public affairs. Where polity members
succeed in directing state-controlled resources to their own exclusive
activities and in using government power to commit other people's effort
to the extraction of return from those resources, state-backed exploitation
and opportunity hoarding occur. Veterans get pensions that nonveterans
pay for, well-organized ranchers get cheap access to public
lands, recognized Indian tribes get rights to operate tax-exemptcasinos.
Once such government-validated scripts come into play, however, the
advantages they confer typically stir widespread emulation, for example,
in the demands of previously unorganized Indian tribes to be recognized
as full-fledged Native American entities, entitled to the same fiscal
exemptions as their established cousins.
In the United States, exclusion has operated especially along racial
lines, excluding Americans who have known African forebears from full
citizenship through much of the country's history, excluding Chinese in
the nineteenth century, actually interning Japanese Americans during
World War II. Black exclusion has varied dramatically by region within
the United States, with states of the old Cotton South more often using
legal means to exclude black people from voting, public facilities, benefits,
and employment. For Louisiana, Virginia Dommguez documents
how the term "Creole" long referred to all the native-born population
regardless of genetic or national ancestry. In the black/white politicization
of Reconstruction, however, the term became an instrument by
which whites of French or Spanish background not only claimed domination
over anyone with detectable African ancestry but also excluded
from rule other whites who lacked their colonial ancestry (Dommguez
1986). A contradictory situation emerged:
Two types of Louisianians consequently identify themselvestoday as
Creole. One is socially and legally white; the other, socially and legally
colored. The white side by definition cannot accept the existence ofcolored
Creoles;the colored side, by definition, cannot accept the white
200 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
conception of Creole. The problem is encapsulated in the use of the
terms Cajun Creole and Creole Cajun. These expressions make no sense at
all to white Creoles. A Creole in their estimation is a purely white descendant
of French or Spanish settlers in colonial Louisiana; a Cajun is a
purely white descendant of Acadian colonial settlers in southern Louisiana.
(Dominguez 1986, 149)
Although the term has changed meaning several times, although genetically
the Louisiana population is amply mixed, and although socially
defined people of color have their own version of the categories involved,
in the twentieth century the "white" version of Creole/other
became a basis of claims for political control. Within the socially defined
nonwhite population, the term also became politicized, first serving to
distinguish the elite (especially the light-skinned elite) of mixed African
and European descent from the rest and then becoming controversial
and losing favor as civil rights activists led the move toward defining
everyone having some known African ancestry as black.
By the 19305, most of the American South had installed systems of
racial domination based on the white/black line. Theda Skocpol points
out a paradoxical result of New Deal legislation, which allocated great
discretionary power to the states:
Southern authorities feared that even small public assistance grants to
nonworkers would cause entire black families to stay out of the cotton
fields. They prevented this by excluding blacks altogether or by suspending
assistance payments during harvest. Even when grants were
given, moreover, "although discrimination was illegal, southern states
were allowed to pay blacks lower grants than whites by using different
criteria for determining need, and by paying Confederateveterans and
their dependents the maximum grant/' In broad historical perspective,
it is amazing that southern states were able to use federal subsidies after
1934 to enrich assistance to Confederateveterans and survivors, the
very persons who had been excluded altogether from the federal Civil
War pensions of the nineteenth century! (Skocpol 1995, 143)
Even in the face of formal federal prohibitions, individual states and
local administrators managed to build categorical racial inequality into
the very rights of citizens.
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 201
Similar processes operate at an international scale. We have already
examined the creation of new states in response to state-seeking nationalism
as a categorical process. International institutions, interstate compacts,
and transnational organizations likewise involve themselves in
support of categorical distinctions within existing states. The category
of refugee, for example, relates a set of residents juridically, economically,
and socially to inhabitants of at least two territories: the one they
have fled and the one in which they currently live. Liisa Malkki has
worked with Hutu refugees from Burundi, a group whose core fled to
Tanzania in response to 1972 mass killings by the Tutsi-dominated Burundian
army. The majority who settled in internationally certified refugee
camps (such as Mishamo, where Malkki concentrated her effort)
differed little at the start from the smaller number who found toeholds
in and around Kigoma township. By the mid-1980s, however, the two
populations occupied very different positions:
The most relevantcontrast in the present context is that the social status
of being a refugee had a very pronouncedsaliencein the camp refugees'
life-worlds, while in town it generallydid not. In Mishamo it was indispensable
to understand something of the social and political meaning
given collectively to refugeeness and to exile by the campinhabitants.
In contrast,for the people I have called the town refugees, refugee status
was generallynot a collectively heroized or positivelyvalued aspect
of one's social person. Insofar as it was consideredrelevantat all, it was
more often a liability than a protective or positive status. (Malkki 1996,
379-380)
Like small-scale nationalists and internationally designated indigenous
peoples, camp refugees have constructed for themselves a standard history
of their population that represents them as the rightful natives of
Burundi, deprived of their rights by Belgian incompetence and Tutsi
trickery. Categorical membership gives camp refugees distinctive relations
to Burundian citizens, Tanzanian citizens, and international authorities.
United Nations agencies and international nongovernmental
organizations do not necessarily subscribe to the refugees' own cherished
histories, but these histories do reinforce Hutu claims to protection,
temporary use of Tanzanian land, and political distinctness. In an
202 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
unexpected location, we find a conjunctionof opportunity hoarding and
categorical inequality.
Within states, inclusion processes parallel the awarding of independent
states to representatives of ostensible nations (and therefore the
exclusion of rival claimants to representation of the same or crosscutting
nations) on an international scale. We saw just such state-backed production
of categoricalinequality in South Africa. But it occurs, generally
with less severity, in all states. States formally certify labor unions, professional
organizations, firms, and political parties, thus confirming
their priority within their designated spheres over rivals and enemies.
Less formally, states also offer selective recognition to ethnic leaders,
spokespersons for different segments of capital, representatives of organized
women, and other blocs—in each case excluding others categorically
from that piece of power. Included parties share in exploitation
based on state-controlled resources or hoard opportunities based on resources
sequestered with government support.
In principle, we might distinguish between, on the one hand, direct
incorporation of unequal categories into state structure and, on the
other, state intervention to enforce or alter categorically unequal practices
in organizations or arenas falling under the state's jurisdiction. In
either regard, state action often has strong impact on durable inequality.
South African racial legislation directly inscribed racial distinctions into
citizenship, and Jim Crow legislation in the United States of the late
nineteenth century employed a series of devices using invisible ink to
inscribe race into law often without naming the races in print, while
Western states long explicitly barred all females from suffrage when
large shares of adult males could vote. All these arrangements constituted
direct incorporation of legal categories into state structure.
Desegregation of public accommodations; requirements of affirmative
action based on race, gender, or ethnicity in private employment;
and compensatory aid to minority businesses all belong to the second
set of instances, where state intervention significantly affects inequality
in loci outside its own structure. State-driven integration of government-run
schools, elimination of inequality in recruitment to the armed
forces, and legally initiated alteration of electoral districts or access to
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 203
public employment straddle both cases since they involve state intervention
in organizations and arenas the state itself operates. The line
between direct incorporation and state intervention therefore becomes a
continuum.
Because in all sorts of states members of dominant categories ordinarily
mobilize more effectively and enjoy more direct access to agents
or instruments of state power than do members of subordinate categories,
states usually act to reinforce—or at least to sustain—existing categorical
inequalities. Through standard adaptation processes and opportunity
hoarding, even members of exploited categories acquire interests
in the maintenance of categorical distinctions, if not in the degree or
character of inequality across categorical boundaries. Democratic arrangements
attenuate such effects by pitting the normally greater numbers
of the less privileged against the superior resources of the elite;
hence, with favorable alliances, they often produce modest redistribution
of resources toward less favored citizens. But except under the influence
of state-threatening social movements, revolutionary situations,
extensive military mobilizations, major defeats in war, and intense fiscal
crises, we have precious few historical instances of state-led attacks on
unequal categories themselves.
That the category-sustaining work of states is often inadvertent does
not reduce its effect. Observers of welfare states (e.g., Haavio-Mannila
1993; Orloff i996b; Sim 1994) have shown how national redistribution
policies tend to assume and reproduce existing forms of gender inequality;
on the whole, for example, public welfare policies assume that men
will be disproportionately involved in paid work away from home (including
military service) and that women will devote themselves to unpaid
care of others, especially children. Since most states attach significant
rewards to military service and paid work, such an assumption
channels state resources to men and affords women access to those resources
chiefly through marriage to a wage earner or independent
involvement in wage earning. Thus unmarried women who are unemployed
or self-employed and their children almost always lose out in
redistribution, protection, and access to public services.
The same inquiries, however, have also demonstrated substantial
204 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
differences among welfare regimes. Totake the extreme case, Scandinavian
countries (where high proportions of women work for wages and
labor movements have been more successful in maintaining pressure for
extensive state-sponsored benefits) generally grant women more independent
rights than most other capitalist regimes. Feminist analyses of
differences between Scandinavia and other Western regions therefore
assign major importance to national-level political processes in the generation
of state-based inequality. By so doing, they implicitly raise
doubts that patriarchy, male chauvinism, or other unchanging cultural
characteristics drive the politics of gender inequality.
C A T H O L I C E M A N C I P A T I O N I N G R E A T B R I T A I N
What of religion? As the history of nationalism indicates, ties between
religious identity and political privilege have fluctuated enormously
over the long run of European history. During the last millennium, Europe
has witnessed everything from the Ottoman empire's ready (if unequal)
absorption of Christians and Jews to the Nazis' programmed annihilation
of those Jews they could track down. Broadly speaking,
political exclusion on the basis of religious identity increased with the
violently vindictive pursuit of Muslims, Jews, and Christian heretics
during the fifteenth century; reached a state of war through much of
Central and Western Europe during the sixteenth century; stabilized in
the same regions from 1648 to 1789 with the Westphalian doctrine of
cujus regio ejus religio; and then receded irregularly through much of the
continent from the French Revolution onward.
Twentieth-century nationalism, for the most part, stresses nonreligious
markers such as language and descent. Tobe sure, religious prejudice
and unofficial discrimination survived the French Revolution,
sometimes even flourishing as in nineteenth-century pogroms and the
Dreyfus case. Nazi policy specifically targeted Jews for their religious
difference. Nevertheless, by the twentieth century, categorical religious
exclusion from political rights became rare. Even anti-Semitism took on
more racist than religious content, with current beliefs and affiliations
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 205
mattering much less than imputed descent (Birnbaum 1993). Until recently,
at least this was true; whether the sharpening of state-identified
religious divisions in the former Soviet Union, in disintegrated Yugoslavia,
and potentially in France constitutes a reversal or a momentary aberration
remains to be seen.
Insertion of religious, ethnic, or racialboundaries into state organization
renders readily visible the parallels between manifestly political
forms of action and routine smaller-scale operations of categorical inequality.
South Africa under apartheid represents an extreme case of a
general phenomenon. All governments survive and thrive to the extent
that they successfully establish exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation,
and adaptation. Governments differ chiefly in who benefits
from these inequality-producing processes.
The politics of inclusion and exclusion on the basis of religious affiliation
provides a serious challenge to organizational explanations of inequality.
Here, if anywhere, we might expect deeply ingrained individual
and collective attitudes to override (or explain) the installation of
categorical inequality. The case of Catholic exclusion and inclusion in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Britain, however, shows us
exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation, and adaptation allrecognizably
at work. The story of British struggles over Catholic rights joins
our earlier stories of nationalism and of South African racial divisions.
We recognize them all as coming from the book of durable categorical
inequality. In all of them, the construction and imposition of categories
served the exploitative interests of rulers and political entrepreneurs.
But in the saga of Catholic Emancipation, we see the British ruling-class
interest in political control countered by increasingly salient interests in
military resources and the maintenance of order.
How so? The tale of Catholic Emancipation unfolds between the
Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 and the relaxation of religious restrictions
on citizenship in 1828-1829. ^n tnat tale we see Britain's ruling
classes operating a system of exploitation in which state power draws
effort from the Catholic (and especially Irish Catholic)masses while barring
them from returns of that effort. Anglican elites hoard opportunities
afforded them by the political system, and emulation builds the
206 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
distinctions Anglican-Catholic-Dissenters into a wide range of social settings,
while adaptation both creates partial exemptions for elite Dissenters
and organizes an uneasy but effective modus vivendi among members
of diverse religious categories.
In Great Britain, the political program that eventually won the name
"Catholic Emancipation" originated in wars, both civil and international.
Struggles of 1688-1689 toppled Roman CatholicJames II from the
British throne, established Protestant William of Orange as king, and
restored a Protestant ruling class in colonized, largely Catholic, Ireland.
The Glorious Revolution of 1689 barred Catholics from public office,
capping their exclusion with an officeholder's oath that denied tenets of
the Catholic religion and (in the case of members of Parliament) explicitly
rejected the pope's authority. Britain's and Ireland's Catholics fell
under the double suspicion of subservience to a foreign authority, the
pope, and of collaboration with Britain's historic enemy, France. The
British state, in essence, matched the interior category of officeholding
citizen to the exterior category of Anglican.
Although non-Anglican Protestants also suffered political disabilities
under the settlement of 1689, in practice subsequent regimes shut Catholics
out of Parliament and public life much more effectively. Anglicans,
and to a lesser extent other Protestants, hoarded officeholding opportunities,
while the British gained the benefits of Irish Catholic efforts without
sharing these benefits. Once again, exploitation and opportunity
hoarding coincide. Over the longer run, however, the costs of exclusion
came to exceed its benefits to British rulers. Collective action by Catholics
themselves played a significant part in that shifting balance. How
that happened is the story of Catholic Emancipation.
Oaths of abjuration individualized membership in the Catholic category
and made it seem centrally a matter ofbelief. Certainly Catholicism
had implications for individual characteristics and behavior in the
United Kingdom, as it did elsewhere. But to be Catholic in the sense
that influenced British citizenship between 1689 and 1829 consisted of
involvement in crucial social ties: relations to priests and the church
hierarchy, relations to a publicly identified community of Catholic believers,
and most of all, relations—largely negative—to an Anglican es-
tablishment.
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 207
Just as categorizing someone as a worker conveniently signals a bundle
of personal characteristics but finally depends on distinction from
and relation to the employer category, categorizing someone as a Catholic
finally designates a boundary and a distinctive set of social ties across
that boundary. Distinctions between Catholic and non-Catholic obviously
existed before 1689 and after 1829; between the two dates, however,
they coincided with relations between fuller and lesser citizens. As
time went on, that coincidence came under increasing challenge.
Catholic exclusion had serious political consequences. When Britain
won Quebec from France in the Seven Years War (1756-1763), the British
empire not only gained jurisdiction over an almost unanimously Catholic
population but also pacified resistance to British control by large concessions
to Quebecois, hence to Catholic, self-rule. That settlement inserted
a twin to Ireland into the British realm but granted its Catholics
more favorable conditions than their Irish coreligionists enjoyed. To the
extent that the British incorporated Catholic Ireland into their economy
and polity, furthermore, the Irish Protestant establishment became a less
effective instrument of indirect rule, and the demands of Catholic Irish
on both sides of the Irish Sea for either autonomy or representation
swelled. Enlargement of the armed forces during the American war, finally,
rendered military recruiters increasingly eager to enroll Irish warriors,
already reputed as mercenaries elsewhere in Europe but barred
from British military service by the required anti-Catholic oath.
Military-inspired exemptions of Catholic soldiers from oathtaking
during the later 17705 raised strident objections among defenders of Anglican
supremacy. Such exemptions directly incited the formation of a
nationwide Protestant Association to petition, agitate, and resist. Scottish
member of Parliament Lord George Gordon, whose vociferous
opposition to Catholic claims brought him to the head of the association
in 1780, led an anti-Catholic campaign that at first concentrated
on meetings and parliamentary petitions but during June 1780 ramified
into attacks on Catholic persons and (especially) property in London.
Two hundred seventy-five people died during those bloody struggles,
chiefly at the hands of troops who were retaking control over London's
streets. Among Britain's ruling classes, those so-called Gordon Riots
gave popular anti-Catholicism an aura of violent unreason. By negation,
208 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
advocacy of Catholics7
political rights acquired the cachet of enlighten-
ment.
From that time onward an important fusion occurred. CatholicEmancipation
became a standard (although by no means universal) demand
of reformers and radicals who campaigned for parliamentary reform.
By "reform/7
its advocates generally meant something like elimination
of parliamentary seats controlled by patrons, more uniform qualifications
for voting across the country, enlargement of the electorate, and
frequent parliamentary elections. (Demands for universal suffrage, for
manhood suffrage, or even for equal individual-by-individual representation
among the propertied rarely gained much of a following before
well into the nineteenth century.) Catholic Emancipation dovetailed
neatly with such proposals, since it likewise called for granting a
more equal and effective voice in public affairs to currently excluded
people.
Both parliamentary reform and Catholic Emancipation surged, and
then collapsed, as national political issues in Great Britain several times
between the 17808 and the 18205. But Emancipation became more urgent
during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when William Pitt the
Younger sought to still the Irish revolutionary movement that was undermining
the British state's titanic war effort against France. Pitt
helped create a (dubiously) United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
in 1801, which meant dissolving the separate Irish Parliament and
incorporating one hundred Irish Protestant members into what had
been Britain's Parliament. In the process, Pitt half-promised major political
concessions to Catholics.
King George Ill's hostility to compromising the Anglican establishment
(and thereby a crown that was already suffering from the wardriven
rise of parliamentary power) made that commitment impossible
to keep. Pitt's consequent resignation by no means stifled Catholic demands.
On the contrary, from 1801 to 1829, Catholic Emancipation remained
one of the United Kingdom's thorniest political issues. The 1807
wartime resignation of the coalition "Ministry of All the Talents," for
example, pivoted on the king's refusal to endorse the admission of Catholics
to high military ranks.
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 209
Much more than a king's attachment to Anglican privilege, however,
made the issue contentious. Anti-Catholicism continued to enjoy wide
popular appeal in Great Britain, the more so as Irish immigration (responding
to industrial expansion in Britain and consequent industrial
contraction in Ireland) accelerated. On the other side, Irish Catholic
elites resisted the even greater separation from important decisions affecting
their island's fate that had resulted from the transfer of the old
Dublin Parliament's powers—however Protestant it had been—to an
English-dominated Parliament in distant Westminster. Repeatedly during
the 18205 two movements coincided: an increasingly popular campaign
for Catholic political rights led by lawyers, priests, and other elites
in Ireland; and a coalition of radicals, reformers, and organized Catholics
in support of Emancipation within Great Britain.Eventually a countermovement
of Protestant resistance to Catholic claims mobilized as
well.
The interweaving movements reached their denouement in 1829.
During the previous six years, Irish Catholic barrister Daniel O'Connell
and his allies had organized successive versions of a mass-membership
Catholic Association in Ireland, with some following in Great Britain.
They perfected a form of organization (drawn initially and ironically
from Methodist models) with which radicals and reformers had experimented
during the great mobilizations of 1816 to 1819. The association
collected a monthly penny—the "Catholic rent"—from thousands of
peasants and workers. With the proceeds, it conducted an incessant, effective
campaign of propaganda, coalition formation, lobbying, and
public claim-making. Each time the British government outlawed their
association, O'Connell and friends fashioned a slightly reorganized (and
renamed) successor to replace it.
Efforts by Protestant supporters of Emancipation to get a bill through
Parliament failed in 1812, failed repeatedly from 1816 to 1822, and failed
again in 1825. But in 1828 a related campaign to expand the political
rights of Protestant Dissenters (e.g., Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians)
by repealing the seventeenth-century Test and Corporation Acts
gained parliamentary and royal assent. Although it had the effect of
removing important allies from the same side of the barricade, on
210 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
balance such an opening made the moment auspicious for Catholic
Emancipation. A regime that had defended Anglican supremacy by excluding
all non-Anglicans from office in principle (despite frequent exceptions
in practice for Dissenters) lost some of its rationale for excluding
Catholics.
Meanwhile, Catholic Ireland moved closer to open rebellion. Despite
well-organized opposition by Anglican diehards, now augmented by
some of the Dissenters who had recently gained fuller political rights,
Prime Minister Wellington and Home Secretary Peel finally promoted
Catholic Emancipation as a lesser evil. They hoped to mute its effect
by narrowing the Irish franchise dramatically, dissolving the Catholic
Association definitively, and barring the association's succession to
other mass organizations.
The House of Lords and the king presented larger obstacles than did
the Commons, which by the early 18208 had on the whole reconciled
itself to some expansion of Catholic rights. The Lords included, of
course, not only peers of the realm but also bishops of the Anglican
church, most of whom would not lightly sacrifice their organization's
privileged political position. At their coronations, furthermore, British
monarchs swore to defend Anglican primacy; in 1828 King George IV
still feared that to approve Catholic Emancipation would violate his coronation
oath.
When the House of Lords again forestalled Emancipation in 1828,
both Irish organizers and their British allies redoubled the Emancipation
campaign, not only expanding the Catholic Association but also staging
massive meetings, marches, and petition drives. The technically illegal
election of Catholic O'Connell to Parliament from a seat in County Clare
during the fall of 1828 directly challenged national authorities, especially
when O'Connell proposed to take his place in Westminster at the
new Parliament's opening early in 1829.
This formidable mobilization, in turn, stimulated a large countermobilization
by defenders of what they called the Protestant Constitution.
In Great Britain, and to a lesser extent in Ireland itself, opponents of
Emancipation organized Brunswick Clubs to manufacture meetings,
marches, petitions, propaganda, and solidarity on behalf of the royal
house of Brunswick. That the Commons, the Lords, and the king finally
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 211
conceded major political rights—although far from perfect equality—to
Catholics during the spring of 1829 resulted from an otherwise unresolvable
crisis in both Ireland and Great Britain. It by no means represented
a general conversion of Britons to religious toleration. Jews, for
example, did not receive similar concessions until 1858. Nor did unofficial
discrimination against Jews or Irish Catholics ever disappear from
British life. We are speaking here of legal exclusion from political rights
on the basis of religious identity.
In 1689, Great Britain built categorical inequality by religion into the
very structure of citizenship, with significant consequences for Catho-
lics7
conditions of life. In 1829, the United Kingdom eliminated most
traces of that inequality from citizenship rights without by any means
rendering Catholics and non-Catholics equal in regard to wealth, income,
prestige, or power. As in cases of legal discrimination by race, a
categorization that initially implemented unequal treatment eventually
became an incentive for, and a basis of, political mobilization against
discrimination.
Although the vast mobilization of Catholics and their supporters in
Great Britain and Ireland succeeded in displacing major barriers to
Catholic participation in the United Kingdom's public life, it also laid
the ground for a nearly contradictory program: the demand for Irish
autonomy and, eventually, independence under Catholic hegemony. In
an age of politicized ethnicity and nationalism, politicized Irish Catholics
represented themselves as yet another nation denied their own
rightful state.
For all its particularities, the history of legally sanctioned religious
inequality in the British Isles shares its causal structure with many other
varieties of categorical inequality: not only South African racial categories
and Balkan ethnicities but also the divisions built into American
health care, immigrant niches, local communities, and the ordinary operation
of capitalist firms. Whether the organization in question is a
state, a firm, or something else, we find exploitation, opportunity
hoarding, emulation, and adaptation. Wefind people who wield power
within an organization responding to organizational problems by creating
or incorporating categorical differences, elaborating and using interpersonal
networks within categorical boundaries, erecting social
212 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
markers at the boundaries, transmitting categorical membership to new
participants, giving multiple parties a stake in perpetuating the categories,
and drawing even persons disadvantaged by their categorical assignment
into some form of collaboration with the system. Although
contempt, mistrust, and misunderstanding often characterize crossboundary
ties, negative feelings do not in themselves explain such systems
of categorical inequality. Even people who do not hate generally
collaborate with them.
Within the history of Catholic Emancipation, we witness the creation
of social movements as major forms of political interaction, including
other struggles over inequality. After 1800 most capitalist countries installed
contested elections as ways of staffing their governments, of
managing polity membership, and of adjudicating competing claims
among polity members. Contested elections designated the members of
parliaments and (directly or indirectly) high executive offices. In the
same process, however, capitalist countries also generated paraelectoral
and paraparliamentary politics in the form of party action, interestgroup
maneuvering, and social movements. Socialmovements in particular
came to play crucial parts as ways of asserting candidacy for polity
membership, of demanding redress, and of getting on the national
agenda the issues that parliamentary, executive, and electoral processes
were currently neglecting.
S O C I A L M O V E M E N T S A N D I N E Q U A L I T Y
Social movements create or activate paired and unequal categories, with
an important twist: they deliberately emphasize the unjust treatment of
people on the weaker side of a categorical line and/or the improper
behavior of people on the stronger side. The "we" referred to by socialmovement
activists comprises a whole category (composite or homogeneous)
of unjustly treated persons or organizations. The "they" consists
of others (industrialists, officials, immoral persons, sometimes competing
groups) whose action or inaction allegedly causes the condition
that activists are protesting in the name of their presumably aggrieved
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 213
constituency. Social movements challenge the exploitation, opportunity
hoarding, emulation, and adaptation that occur on the other side of the
categorical line and threaten drastic collective action by members of
their own constituency. Outsiders' participation in the construction of
categories helps to solve four acute organizational problems: mobilizing
supporters behind a set of demands, coordinating contentious and often
risky action, attracting allies, and—in the case of success—establishing
a structure for the distribution and hoarding of benefits gained.
A social movement is a kind of campaign, parallel in many respects
to an electoral campaign. This sort of campaign, however, demands
righting of a wrong, most often a wrong suffered by a well-specified
population. It constructs that population as a category, often as a categorical
candidate for polity membership. The population in question
can range from a single individual to all humans, or even all living creatures.
Whereas an electoral campaign pays off chiefly in the votes that
finally result from it, a social movement pays off in effective transmission
of the message that its program's supporters are WUNC (Worthy,
Unified, Numerous, and Committed). These four elements compensate
one another to some degree; for example, a high value on worthiness
("respectability" in the language of 1829) can make up for small numbers.
Yet a visibly low value on any one of these elements (a public
demonstration of unworthiness, division, dwindling numbers, and/or
outright defection) discredits the whole movement.
Social-movement campaigning involves a familiar bundle of performances:
creating associations and coalitions, organizing marches and
demonstrations, circulating petitions, attending public meetings, shouting
slogans, wearing badges, writing pamphlets, and more. Seen as
means-end action, such a campaign has a peculiar diffuseness; compared
with striking, voting, smashing the loom of a nonstriking weaver,
or running a miscreant out of town, its actions remain essentially symbolic,
cumulative, and indirect, with almost no chance that any single
event will achieve its stated objective of ending an injustice or persuading
authorities to enact a needed law. Social-movement mobilization
gains its strength from an implicit threat to act in adjacent arenas: to
withdraw support from public authorities, to provide sustenance to a
214 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
regime's enemies, to ally with splinter parties, to move toward direct
action or even rebellion. Skilled social-movement organizers draw tacitly
on such threats to bargain with the objects of their demands.
Social movements take place as conversations—not as solo performances
but as interactions among parties. The most elementary set of
parties consists of an actor making a claim, the object of the actor's
claim, and an audience having a stake in the fate of at least one of the
first two. Whatever else they do, movements dramatize categoricaldifferences
between claimants and objects of claims.But allies, competitors,
enemies, authorities, and multiple audiences also frequently play parts
in movement interactions. Therein lies the complexity of social-movement
organizing, not to mention the complexityof responses by authorities
and objects of claims; third parties always complicate the interac-
tion.
Examined from the viewpoint of challengers, a social movement's
success depends in part on two varieties of mystification. First, as they
increase, worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment almost necessarily
contradict each other; to gain numbers, for example, generally requires
compromise on worthiness, unity, and/or commitment. The actual
work of organizers consists recurrently of patching together
provisional coalitions, suppressing risky tactics, negotiating which of
the multiple agendas that participants bring with them will find public
voice in their collective action, and, above all, hiding backstage struggle
from public view. They almost always exaggerate their coalition's
WUNC.
Second, movement activists seek to present themselves and (if different)
the objects of their solicitude as a solidary group, preferably as a
group with a long history and with a coherent existence outside the
world of public claim-making. In that regard, they resemble state-seeking
nationalists with their constructions of long, coherent, distinctive
cultural histories for their nations. Thus feminists identify themselves
with women's age-old struggles for rights in the streets and in everyday
existence, civil rights leaders minimize class and religious differences
within their racial category, and environmentalists present most
of humankind as their eternal community. Organizers of the Catholic
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 215
Emancipation campaign, including Daniel O'Connell, spent much of
their energy striving to create a united public front and portraying their
constituents as a long-suffering solidary population who had waited far
too long forjustice.
The two varieties of mystification address several different audiences.
They encourage activists and supporters to make high estimates of the
probability that fellow adherents will take risks and incur costs for the
cause, hence that their own contributions will bear fruit. They warn authorities,
objects of claims, opponents, rivals, and bystanders to take the
movement seriously as a force that can affect their fates.
Movements differ significantly in the relative attention they give to
these various audiences, from self-absorbed tests of daring organized by
small clusters of terrorists to signature of petitions by transient participants
who want some authority to know their opinion. These orientations
frequently vary in the course of a given social movement, for example,
in transitions from internal building to ostentatious action to
fighting off competitors and enemies.
Neither in the case of CatholicEmancipation nor in general does mystification
mean utter falsehood. Activists and constituents of social
movements vary considerably in the extent to which they actually embody
worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment and in the degree to
which they spring from a single solidary group with a collective life
outside the world of public politics. Tothe extent that the two varieties
of mystification contain elements of truth, furthermore, social movements
generally mobilize more effectively. A segregated ethnic community
threatened by outside attack, on the average, mobilizes more
readily than does the entire category consisting of all those who suffer
from diverse attacks on civil liberties.
The process whereby social-movement activists achieve recognition
as valid interlocutors for unjustly deprived populations does not resemble
the fact-finding inquiries of novelists, social scientists, or investigative
reporters. It resembles a court proceeding, in which those who
make such claims, however self-evident to them, must establish themselves
in the eyes of others—authorities, competitors, enemies, and relevant
audiences—as voices that require attention and must commonly
216 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
establish themselves in the face of vigorous opposition. They must
prove that they qualify. Almost all such proofs entail suppression of
some evidence and exaggeration of other evidence concerning the
claimants' WUNC and their grounding in a durable, coherent, solidary,
deprived population. Again, resemblances to state-seeking nationalism
immediately strike the mind's eye.
Analysts of collective action, especially those who entertain sympathy
for the actions they are studying, often insist on these mystified elements
as intrinsic to social movements: the presence of solidarity, the
construction of shared identities, the sense of grievance, the creation of
sustaining organizations, and more. Without such features, analysts say,
we have nothing but ordinary politics. Sometimes the myths fulfill
themselves, building up the lineaments of durable connection among
core participants. But most social movements remain far more contingent
and volatile than their mystifications allow; these other elements
do not define the social movement as a distinctive political phenom-
enon.
What does? Social movements involve collective claims on authorities.
A social movement consists of a sustained challenge to powerholders
in the name of a population living under the jurisdiction of those
powerholders by means of repeated public displays of that population's
numbers, commitment, unity, and worthiness. We, the aggrieved, demand
that you, the perpetrators of evil or the responsible authorities,
act to alleviate a condition about which we are justly indignant. Although
some of our actions may express support for proposals, programs,
or persons that are already advancing our aims, most of our displays
dramatize not only our own WUNC but also the existence of
conditions we oppose.
As they developed in Great Britain and other Western European
countries during the early nineteenth century, characteristic socialmovement
displays (whose relative weight varied considerably from
movement to movement) included creating special-purpose associations;
lobbying officials; organizing public meetings, demonstrations,
and marches; circulating petitions; writing pamphlets; publicizing statements
in mass media; posting or wearing identifying signs; and adopting
distinctive slogans. Although the advocates and opponents of
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 217
Catholic Emancipationhad by no means mastered this full array of techniques
in 1828 and 1829, they tried them all. They were, indeed, inventing
the social movement as they went along.
Let me stress the fact of invention. For all its contentiousness, most
of human history has proceeded without social movements as such. Rebellions,
revolutions, avenging actions, rough justice, and many other
forms of popular collective action have abounded, but not the associating,
meeting, marching, petitioning, propagandizing, sloganeering, and
brandishing of symbols that mark social movements.
With some eighteenth-century precedents, this complex of interactions
emerges as a way of doing political business in Western Europe
during the nineteenth century; however we finally sort out the priorities,
Britain shares credit for the invention. In Great Britain, the actual
inventors were political entrepreneurs such as John Wilkes, LordGeorge
Gordon, William Cobbett, Daniel O'Connell, and Francis Place. They,
their collaborators, and their followers bargained out space for new
forms of political action—bargained it out with local and national authorities,
with rivals, with enemies, with the objects of their claims. The
tales of contention over Catholic Emancipation in March 1829 provide
glimpses of that bargaining.
Social movements, then, center on the construction of categorical
identities. Identities in general are shared experiences of distinctive social
relations and the representations of those social relations. Workers
become workers in relation to employers and other workers; women
become women in relation to men and other women; Orthodox
Jews become Orthodox Jews in relation to non-Jews, non-Orthodox
Jews, and other Orthodox Jews. Like social movements, nationalism and
religious qualifications for citizenship involve the construction and enforcement
of unequal, paired categories.
P O L I T I C A L I D E N T I T I E S
Political identities are the subset of identities to which governments are
parties. For all the enormous variation in the form and content of political
identities, we can assert that the following propositions are true:
218 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
Political identities are alwaysand everywhererelationaland col-
lective.
Most politicalidentities are also categorical rather than specific to
a tie between two particular actors.
Political identities therefore alter as politicalnetworks, opportunities,
and strategies shift.
The validationof politicalidentities depends on contingent performances
to which other parties' acceptance or rejection of the asserted
relationis crucial.
That validationboth constrainsand facilitates collectiveactionby
those who share theidentity.
Deep differences separatepolitical identitiesthat areembedded
in routine social life from those that appear chiefly in public life
(embedded and disjoined collectiveidentities).
These propositions break with three very different but common waysof
understanding political identities: first, as straightforward activations
of durable personal traits, whether individual or collective; second, as
malleable features of individual consciousness; third, as purely discursive
constructions.
The first view appears incessantly in interest-based accounts of political
participation, which generally depend on some version of methodological
individualism. The second view recurs in analyses of political
commitment as a process of self-realization and correlates closely with
an assumption of phenomenological individualism, the doctrine that
personal consciousness is the primary—or, at a solipsistic extreme, the
only—social reality. The third appears repeatedly in postmodern accounts
of identity, many of which likewise lean toward solipsism. My
own view denies neither discursive construction, personal traits, nor individual
psyches but rather places relations among actors at the center
of social processes.
What does "relational and collective" mean? A political identity is an
actor's experience of a shared social relation in which at least one of
the parties—including third parties—is an individual or an organization
controlling concentrated means of coercion within some substantial territory.
Political identities usually double with shared public represents
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 219
lions of both relation and experience. Thus at various times the same
people represent themselves as workers, local residents, ethnics,
women, citizens, gays, partisans, and other categories that distinguish
them from other parts of the population. In each case they engage in
authenticating performances that establish worthiness, unity, numbers,
and commitment—for example, by marching together, wearing badges,
singing songs of solidarity or shouting slogans.
Under specifiable social conditions, collective identities that people
deploy in the course of contention correspond to embedded identities,
those that inform their routine social lives: race, gender, class, ethnicity,
locality, kinship, and so on. Observers tend to label as either "spontaneous"
or "traditional" the forms of collective vengeance, shaming, obstruction,
and mutual manipulation that spring from embedded identities.
Observers also commonly imagine the central causal mechanisms
to be transformations of individual consciousness, when in fact selective
fortification of certain social ties and divisions at the expense of others
impels the mobilization. Although they usually operate at a small scale,
when they are under attack by powerholders and enemies embedded
identities such as religious affiliation and ethnicity can become the basis
of fierce, extensive contention. The Protestant Reformation and the
breakup of the Soviet Union featured just such activation of embedded
identities.
Under other conditions, people turn to disjoined identities, ones that as
such rarely or never govern everyday social relations. Disjoined collective
identities often include associational memberships, asserted nationalities,
and legal categories such as "minority," "tribe," or "military veteran."
In these cases, participants invoke salient social ties much more
selectively than is the case with embedded identities. Political entrepreneurs,
on the average, play much larger parts in their activation. Beth
Roy's analysis of how Bengali villagers came to redefine local conflicts
as aligning "Hindus" against "Muslims" beautifully illustrates such entrepreneurially
mediated mobilization: the farther the intervening political
entrepreneurs were situated from the particular village and the more
heavily they were involved in national politics, the more they invoked
generally recognizable categories (Roy 1994).
220 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
The distinction between embedded and disjoined collective identities
marks endpoints of a continuum. The collective identity "citizen/7
for
example, falls somewhere in between, typically shaping relations between
employers and workers and strongly affecting political involvements
but making little difference to a wide range of other social routines.
The embedded-disjoined distinction denies, however, two
common (and contradictory) ways of understanding the identities that
prevail in contentious politics: either as simple activations of preexisting,
even primordial, individual attributes or as pure discursive constructions
having little or no grounding in social organization. From embedded
to disjoined, collective identities resemble linguistic genres in
entailing coherent interpersonal collaboration but varying contingently
in content, form, and applicability from setting to setting.
The embedded-disjoined contrast also parallels my earlier distinction
between interior and exterior categorical pairs. An identity based on
location in a categorical pair counts as embedded in a given setting to
the extent that people organize a wide range of routine social interactions
around it, disjoined to the extent that it becomes salient only on
special occasions. Thus, from the perspective of most firms, membership
or nonmembership in a sports team remains invisible most of the time;
but on the day before a big match, it becomes a basis of differentiation.
Within schools, however, sports team membership often makes a difference
for a wide range of social relations; it operates in the interior as an
embedded category.
Reinforced by contention, internal organization, or acquisition of
privileges, disjoined identities sometimes become salient in everyday
social relations as well, but they begin elsewhere. Through its various
policies from 1903 to 1981, as we have seen, the South African state
reified and ratified racial categories that eventually came to loom large
in social routines. Eventually, the state and its diverse agents mapped
such categories as Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaner, and Coloured onto the entire
population with such force that the categories governed significant
shares of everyday social relations. Thus initially disjoined collective
identities embedded themselves.
Through sharpening categorical boundaries and promoting shared
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 221
activities, participation in social movements has likewise partially embedded
disjoined identities in routine social life among women, ethnic
minorities, or military veterans. The process also runs in the other direction,
generalizing and disjoining embedded identities, as when carpenters
in one shop, machinists in another, and pipefitters in a third band
together not in those identities but as generalized workers. Nevertheless,
the distinction matters: the degree to which political identities are
embedded or disjoined strongly affects the quantity of widely available
knowledge they draw on, the density of underpinning social ties, the
strength of conflicting commitments, the ease of emulation from one
setting to another, and therefore the effectiveness of different organizing
strategies.
The distinction between embedded and disjoined collective identities
corresponds approximately to the difference between local contention
and national social-movement politics in early nineteenth-century Europe,
when a major shift toward the national arena was transforming
popular politics (Tarrow 1994; Traugott 1995). As they made claims
through such forms of interaction as shaming ceremonies, grain seizures,
and the burning of effigies, people generally deployed collective
identities corresponding closely to those that prevailed in routine social
life: householder, carpenter, neighbor, and so on. Wecan designate these
forms of interaction as parochial and particularistic, since they ordinarily
occurred within localized webs of social relations, incorporating practices
and understandings peculiar to those localized webs. They also
often took a patronized form, relying on appeals to privileged intermediaries
for intercession with more distant authorities.
In demonstrations, electoral campaigns, and public meetings, on the
other hand, participants often presented themselves as party supporters,
association members, citizens, and similar disjoined collective identities.
These types of claim-making can be described as national, modular,
and autonomous, calling attention to their frequent fixation on national
issues and objects, their standardization from one setting or issue to another,
and the frequency with which participants directly addressed
powerholders they did not see in everyday social contacts. The difference
signified large contrasts in social relations among participants,
222 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
mobilization patterns, and the organization of action itself. The shift
from parochial, particularistic, often patronized forms of claim-making
to autonomous, national, and modular forms articulated with profound
alterations in social structure.
These shifts in Europe's predominant forms of claim-making of
course took place in different versions at different times and paces from
one region to another. Altogether, they constituted a dramatic alteration
of contentious repertoires. Repertoires of contention resemble conversational
conventions linking particular sets of interlocutors to each other:
far narrower than the technical capacities of the parties would allow
or their interests alone prescribe, repertoires form and change through
mutual claim-making itself. Like economic institutions that evolve
through interaction among organizations but significantly constrain the
forms of economic relations at any particular point in time, they limit
possibilities for collective action and interaction (Nelson 1995).
Evolution of the demonstration as a means of claim-making, to take
an obvious example, tilts activists, police, spectators, rivals, and political
officials toward well-defined ways of organizing, anticipating, and responding
to the claims made in this medium and to sharp distinctions
from claims laid by bombing or bribing (Favre 1990). Strikes, sit-ins,
mass meetings, and other forms of claim-making link well-defined identities
to each other, involve incessant innovation, and change configuration
over the long run but accumulate their own histories, memories,
lore, laws, and standard practices. Repertoires, in short, are historically
evolving, strongly constraining, cultural products. They combine emulation
and adaptation almost seamlessly.
What difference, then, does the presence or absence of a government
make to the operation of exploitation and opportunity hoarding? Politicization
of categorical inequality increases the salience of governmentenforced
law, of coercive means, and of polity positions on either sideof
categorical boundaries. Mobilization of support through elections, social
movements, and influence networks becomes a means by which those
contesting control of particular resources—whether governmentdominated
or otherwise—increase their leverage. Since, however, current
control of crucial resources augments the capacity of any actor to
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 223
mobilize political support through elections, influence networks, and
even social movements, in ordinary circumstances the operations of
states sustain existing patterns of categoricalinequality rather than subverting
them.
I N E Q U A L I T Y A N D B A S I C P O L I T I C A L P R O C E S S E S
The previous discussion implies a general answer to our second question,
the issue of how the character and extent of categoricalinequality
in an organization or population affect its basic political processes.
Clearly, they affect those processes profoundly. Categorical inequality
forms one of the major grounds and constraints of political life. Let me
take up just one implication, the relation between inequality and democracy.
Let us call a polity democratic to the extent that it features these
elements:
Broadcitizenship
Equalcitizenship
Binding consultation of citizens with respect to state personnel and
performance
Protection of citizens,especially membersof minorities,againstarbitrary
action by stateagents
In one obvious way and two less obvious ways, the definition itself incorporates
questions of inequality. By definition, obviously,unequal citizenship
(e.g., votes for men only or two-tiered systems of state-guaranteed
benefits) diminishes democracy. Since 1792, when the French
Revolution abolished distinctions between "active" citizens (that is, essentially,
propertied adult males) and "passive" citizens (that is, essentially
unpropertied adult males who were nevertheless subject to military
service), Western struggles for democracyhave frequently centered,
precisely, on the equalization of rights among previously distinguished
categories of citizens.
Less obviously, narrow citizenship entails substantial inequality with
respect to rights within a state's territory; some subjects of the state
224 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
enjoy citizenship while others do not. Before 1865 American slaves did
not possess citizenship in any meaningful sense of the word. Apartheid
South Africa's virtual exclusion of black Africans from citizenship at a
national scale constituted one of its most undemocratic features. Kuwait
today excludes the great majority of its work force, recruited immigrants,
from citizenship.
Where armed forces enjoy autonomous political power, finally, their
autonomy constitutes a violation of equal citizenship, binding consultation,
and protection. (Ifyou had to judge whether a state was democratic
or not on the basis of a single organizational feature, whether the police
reported to the military or to civilian authorities would serve as an excellent
guide.) Western countries struggled to their halfway democracies
only by containing autonomous military power, and those that failed to
do so (for example, Spain and Portugal) saw nominally democratic regimes
fail repeatedly.
That inequalities within citizenship, inequalities between citizens and
noncitizens, or unequal political autonomy between armed forces and
civilians violate democracy by definition does not reduce their substantive
threat to democratic politics. Outside the zone of definition, deep
categorical inequality also threatens democracy. The main dynamic is
simple: to the extent that people on the advantaged sides of categorical
divides are small in number and rich in resources, they combine the
incentive and the capacity to buy their way out of democratic processes.
They can and will effectively narrow citizenship, render it unequal, subvert
binding consultation, and undermine protection. In popular elections,
for example, the co-presence of a few very rich people and many
very poor people encourages the buying of candidates, votes, and election
judges, as well as extraelectoralpatronage. Where elections are relatively
honest, exploiters and opportunity hoarders can still afford to
protect their interests by buying or subverting state authorities.
Answers to our first two questions—how states relate to the operation
of categorical inequality and how the character of categorical inequality
affects basic political processes—therefore imply answers to the
other two: ascertaining when inequality itself becomes an object of political
struggle and when political struggle and/or governmental action
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 225
actually changes prevailing patterns of inequality. Let us return to each
question briefly.
Because exploitation and opportunity hoarding often involve an effective
means of control over members of excluded and subordinated
categories, because emulation naturalizes distinctions by making them
ubiquitous, and because adaptation ties even exploited groups to the
structure of exploitation, most categoricalinequality stays in place without
sustained, overt struggle. James Scott (1985, 1990) has argued the
contrary, indicating that subordinate groups commonly use "weapons
of the weak" based on "hidden transcripts" of opposition to subvert
powerholders. The histories of landlord-tenant relations, religious inequalities,
and social movements indicate, however, that organizers generally
have a difficult time stimulating shared awareness of oppression
and determination to resist, that even with intense organizing efforts
they fail except in special structural circumstances.
What are these circumstances? In the broadest terms, they occur
when the benefits from exploitation and opportunity hoarding decline
and/or the costs of exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation, and
adaptation increase. In those circumstances, the beneficiaries of categorical
inequality tend to split, with some of them becoming available as the
underdogs' allies against other exploiters and hoarders. Contradictions
between beliefs sustaining categoricalboundaries and day-to-day social
life then become more visible, which undermines inequality-sustaining
beliefs and practices both by making justification more difficult and by
promoting mobilization in the name of justice. When the altered structural
position of a subordinated population increases its leverage or internal
connectedness—as when Irish soldiers became more essential to
British armies and Irish workers more essential to British industry—
eventually the costs of controlling that population expand, along with
capacity to resist control. Finally, exploiters themselves sometimes inadvertently
create opportunities for claim-making, as when British rulers'
concessions to organized Protestant Dissenters in 1828 weakened their
grounds for excluding organized Catholics in 1829, or when the U.S.
government's modest concessions to black civil rights demands in the
19605 established a powerful model for claim-making on behalf of other
226 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
subordinated populations such as women, gays, older people, Hispanics,
Native Americans.
The principles and cases we have been exploring recommend rough
distinctions among top-down, competitive, and bottom-up situations.
From the top down, inequality typically becomes an object of political
struggle when would-be exploiters or opportunity hoarders seek to subordinate
or exclude from relevant resources members of categories that
have previously held collective rights to more favorablecircumstances.
State-led nationalism's generation of resistance by minorities provides a
case in point, but so do plant shutdowns that incite worker takeovers.
Among competitive situations, the invasion of an established ethnic
occupational niche by members of a new immigrant population frequently
causes bitter conflict. So, as we have seen, does the confrontation
of rival claimants to statehood within the same territory. Both internal
changes (e.g., shifts in the demographic balance between two
previously accommodated populations) and external changes (e.g., collapse
of a previously restraining national authority) generate such struggles
(Margadant 1992; Olzak 1992). For recent American history, Orlando
Patterson describes the "paradox of desegregation":
When blacks and whites were segregatedfrom each other therewas little
opportunityfor conflict. The two groupslived in largelyseparate
worlds, and when they did come in contact their interactions were
highly structured by the perverseetiquetteof racial relations.The system
may have workedwell in minimizingconflict, as long asboth
groups playedby the rules, but it was clearly a pernicious arrangement
for blacks since it condemnedthem to inferior status and excluded them
from participation in the political life of their societyand from nearlyall
the more desirableopportunities for economic advancement.
Desegregation meantpartialaccess to the far superior facilities and
opportunities open previouslyonly to whites. Hence, it entailed a great
improvement in the conditionand dignity of blacks. All this should be
terribly obvious,but it must be spelled out becauseit is preciselythisobvious
improvementthat is so often implicitly denied when we acknowledge
one of the inevitableconsequencesof desegregation:namelythat,
as individuals in both groups meet more and more, the possibility for
conflict is bound to increase.(Patterson 1995,26)
THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y 227
Patterson is identifying a crucial aspect not only of recent African American
experience but of inequality's competitive politics in general.
From the bottom up, South African experience gives us insight into
situations where members of subordinate categories acquire increased
collective capacity to withhold valuable resources, resist control, exploit
elite divisions, and enlist outside allies. Parallels with British Catholics'
demands for political participation, American blacks' mobilization for
civil rights, and Western women's campaigns for equal pay should become
obvious. In short, classic conditions for collective action obtain
(Calhoun 1991; Marwell and Oliver 1993; Oliver 1993; Tarrow 1994;
Traugott 1995).
When do struggle and/or governmental action change—even reduce—prevailing
patterns of inequality? When members of subordinate
categories not only mobilize broadly but actually gain power, substantial
alterations of inequality often occur rapidly. In the extreme case of
revolutions, alliances of underdogs with fragments of the ruling coalition,
acquisition of armed force by members of a revolutionary coalition,
neutralization or defection of the regime's armed force, and revolutionary
control over some significant part of the state apparatus all promote
the overturning of the old regime.
Short of revolution, similar conditions foster extensive change in inequality.
In South Africa, for example, fragmentation of the white elite
not only provided opportunities for black mobilization but also opened
up alliances that facilitated black sharing of power. The increasing reliance
of white-controlled urban enterprises on black labor; the consequent
mismatch between the apartheid system of control and the actual
daily movements of the black population; black mobilization within the
townships, enclaves, and migration networks that had been created or
reinforced by apartheid arrangements; and international sanctions
against the regime and its major corporations—all these conditions not
only increased the costs to political elites of operating the system of
categorical inequality but also diminished returns to holders ofcapitalist
property. These circumstances inclined some members of the ruling coalition
to form alliances across categorical boundaries and made their
still-resisting fellow rulers more vulnerable to attack. Although income
228 THE P O L I T I C S OF I N E Q U A L I T Y
and wealth inequality still divide South Africans more deeply than in
almost any other country of the world, at least in the public sector substantial
equalization occurred within a few years. Over the medium run,
that shift in political power will most likely cause some equalization in
wealth, income, education, health, housing, and living conditions across
what had been one of the world's starkest divisions of categorical in-
equality.
South Africa's partial revolution does not bespeak a worldwide trend
toward equality. Material inequality is increasing in the major capitalist
countries, while in many parts of the world political mobilization on
behalf of religious, ethnic, and national categories is promoting new,
destructive forms of inequality. These two trends toward inequality
make democracy more difficult to sustain or achieve. Tothe extent that
categorical differences in life chances by race, gender, ethnicity, citizenship,
and other well-marked boundaries already divide social life, those
visible differences, their sustaining practices, and their rationalizing beliefs
are readily available for incorporation into new forms of exploitation
and opportunity hoarding. In addition to inequality's immediate
effects on welfare, threats to democracy give us one more reason for
worrying about the general trend toward inequality in the capitalist and
postsocialist worlds.