Democracy should mean we are all of equal worth

Money undermines democracy in all kinds of ways. When too much money is concentrated in too few hands, this opens up space for corruption, for the bribing of politicians to support policies favouring the few. More indirectly, money buys media power and can then shape what voters consider desirable and politicians consider possible. From the other side, the absence of money can destroy time, turning people’s lives into such a relentless struggle for survival that they have neither the time nor energy to exercise their democratic rights. In all these ways, the promise of democracy can be undermined by economic inequality.

But there is something arguably deeper than any of these. This is the way inequalities in income and wealth can erode what I take to be the whole point of democracy, the idea that each of us is of equal significance and worth. This is the notion presented to us, in fledgling and ambiguous form, in those startling proclamations from the late eighteenth century: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” (American Declaration of Independence); “Men are born free and remain equal in rights” (French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen). It is the notion John Stuart Mill attributed to Jeremy Bentham (not himself the most obvious of democrats), that each is to count for one and none for more than one. It is the profoundly important idea that no one person is to be deemed qualitatively superior to any other.

When first formulated, these ideas fell far short of what we might now think of as democratic equality. The early proclamations asserted the equality of men, but when they said men, they really meant men, not women; they meant white men, not black; and they made their claims just as the great powers were poised to divide up the world among themselves as colonial possessions, making vast numbers of people their subjects, not their equals. Protestations about equality have excluded many more than they included, and the history of the last few centuries may be best read as a history of the struggles to combat all those exclusions, and give democracy its fuller meaning. What we now face, however, is the seeping away of the meaning and substance of that equality, just at the point when it seems the majority of individuals are finally included in its scope.

Stark inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth encourage us to regard one another almost as different species of humans. Across much of Europe, inequalities were significantly reduced in the immediate post-war decades. Higher taxation reduced the income gap, while the expansion of public services began to break down many of the barriers that demarcated the lives of the wealthy from the lives of those living in poverty.

Yet since the 1970s, that process has been largely reversed, and people once again live increasingly cordoned lives. When public provision worsens, and those who can afford it buy themselves out of shared systems into better provision, our daily lives no longer meet. We no longer share in the routines of our existence, in the schools we send our children to, the hospitals where we get treatment, the buses we travel on, the libraries from which we borrow books. Those at the richer end can buy themselves out, and often lose the capacity to view what then seem very distant others as their equals. For those at the poorer end, the insecurities and vulnerabilities that accompany increasing inequality also have their effect. In this case through eroding the capacity to view those perceived as a threat to one’s own precarious position—immigrants, for example, or those dependent on benefits—as people like oneself and equally worthy of respect.

In a world of stark economic inequalities, democratic equality becomes something we pay lip-service to rather than something we live or feel. This, to me, is the really dangerous impact of economic inequality on democracy. Democracy is not just a system of voting rights or multi-party competition or free press or the rule of law, or all of the (important) institutional mechanisms we associate with it. What underpins it is that idea, so imperfectly expressed in phrases about all men being created equal, about all of us being of equal worth. This is what democracy is fundamentally about, and what we may be close to losing.

To find out more about further British Academy debates on inequality visit their website