Inequality in Canada: The History and Politics of an Idea

Eric Sager examines the concept of inequality in Canada throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing its various meanings and contexts across different ideologies and movements. He argues that inequality is not just about income and wealth distribution but also about the wide gaps between rich and poor, which are both economic and social injustices. Sager suggests that a political solution to inequality may require a recovery of an ethical ideal and egalitarian politics that have long been central to Canadian thought.

Format: Paperback / softback
Publication date: 20 January 2021
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

Inequality in Canada is a complex and multifaceted concept that has evolved over time, with different meanings and contexts across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eric Sager explores the idea of inequality in this context, tracing its development from classical economics to the emerging welfare economics of the twentieth century. In Canada, inequality took a distinct form, appearing in various contexts such as Protestant critiques of wealth, labor movements, farmer-progressive politics, the social gospel, social Catholicism in Quebec, English-Canadian political economy, and political and intellectual justifications of the social security state. Despite deep silences among Canadian economists, a tradition of idealist thought persisted in the twentieth century, sustaining the idea of inequality. Sager argues that inequality goes beyond the distribution of income and wealth, encompassing wide gaps between rich and poor and posing both an economic problem and a social injustice. He suggests that a political solution to inequality may lie in the recovery of an ethical ideal and egalitarian politics that have long preoccupied Canadian thought.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780228005803