Mike Savage is Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics.
Although inequality is widely seen as ‘defining challenge of our time’, the full stakes of the inequality have not been sufficiently appreciated, and the ‘inequality debate’ has become mired in in-fighting.
In this lecture, which draws on themes from my forthcoming book ‘The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of History’ I will argue that escalating inequality is bound up with the decline of national formations and the re-emergence of empires, leading to contestation within, and between increasingly powerful elites.
I will explore how concerns regarding inequality therefore testify to wider currents regarding the nature and course of long term social change’.
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