When inequality kills democracies

This sort of blindness to even the most blatant evidence is generated by the fact that structurally unjust societies produce narratives that tend to make injustice itself invisible. Within these narratives, what is instead the product of structural conditions is attributed to the responsibility of individuals. This is the machinery of social injustice, the machine that reproduces disadvantage, as Barry calls it. This machine works through three main levers. The first is related to the unequal distribution of natural and social advantages (the genetic lottery and the family lottery); the second operates through the ability of the strongest to manipulate institutions to their own advantage; and the third operates on the level of story-telling, whereby structural differences are transformed into moral judgements, so that the loser does not even fight back; he simply feels guilty.

"Self-reinforcing inequality", inequality that feeds itself. A spiral in which economic power becomes political power, which becomes institutional power, which finally turns into symbolic power. Because in our societies, 'Inequality not only transmits itself,' the philosopher concludes with some bitterness, 'but also justifies itself' (p. 177).

Beautiful hearts here would evoke a reference to equality of opportunity. Indeed, merit only works if one starts from similar situations. A hypocritical cult and façade. "Empty words around the virtues of equal opportunity," Barry calls them, "but the usual mantra is 'equal opportunity to become unequal' (p. viii). Opportunity thus becomes, through a simple and perverse mechanism, the justification for inequality and not its remedy. The more fortunate, by birth, wealth, education, do not merely benefit from their advantages but turn them into institutional norms, into new rules of the game. And those left behind not only have less, but are also treated as if they were worth less. And so the narrative imposes itself that those who are disadvantaged are responsible for their own failure while those who are successful are perceived as deserving even when their success derives mainly from luck or starting conditions. The machine of injustice is a narrative machine, even before it is an economic machine, it is a collective and not just an individual affair. We often struggle to understand this because 'Until about a century and a half ago, justice was commonly understood as a virtue not of societies, but of individuals' (p. 18).

The 'pathologies of inequality', as Barry calls them, are not just a matter of income or opportunity, they are not an individual but a collective affair. They dig deep, eroding mutual trust and moral responsibility.

The collapse of interpersonal and institutional trust that we described at the beginning of this article is a clear sign of moral rot, of 'moral decay', as the Oxford philosopher calls it. Growing economic inequality threatens the very basic cohesion of a society. "The extent of the moral decay caused by these changes has been clearly demonstrated (...) the disintegration of the social bond and all the evils that come with it (...) Just as the first-class passengers on the Titanic were able to get most of the lifeboats, the very rich are able to look forward to the disintegration of the social bond and all the evils that come with it, because they can buy their way out" (p. 184). Inequality thus stops being just an economic variable and becomes the acid that dissolves our deepest and most necessary social bonds.

The language is not casual and the expression moral rot is deliberately strong. One could translate it as we did with 'moral decay'. But in English the more proper meaning is 'decay', 'putrefaction'. These terms evoke not only a decay but also the possibility of a contamination, a passing from one sphere to another, of life. A contagion that passes from individual behaviour to the quality of politics, from everyday relationships to expectations of institutions. This can happen because trust is not a private good and therefore its erosion does not only affect individuals but the entire community. Trust is a relational good, which is only built when lives have some form of proximity, when people meet, when destinies do not diverge in opposite directions. Inequality breaks this proximity. It turns society from a 'we' into a sum of 'I's'.

The question of proximity is central and in fact one of the channels through which the corrosive acid of inequality produces its nefarious effects is precisely the construction of 'architectures of separation': neighbourhoods, schools, segregated lives. The case of American urban ghettos documents how run-down schools and the absence of decent jobs can generate a cumulative spiral of disadvantage. "Poverty and low parental education, the multiple social pathologies of the ghetto, combined with poor schools, produce disastrous educational outcomes. In Chicago, for example, half of the city's high schools rank in the bottom 1 per cent of the American College Test and two-thirds of the city's ghetto students fail to graduate,' (p. 95).

Schools are not just a service, they are the first laboratory of the future. If separations are created here, life will be made for many of diverging paths. Of winners and losers. That is why it is not enough to alleviate poverty, inequality must be reduced. Only social proximity allows a common horizon to exist. Poverty isolates, inequality divides.

Some ten years after the publication of Brian Barry's Why Social Justice Matters, Michael Sandel prints Democracy's Discontent (just reissued in an updated edition for 'perilous times'). The Harvard philosopher's diagnosis precisely echoes the position of his British colleague. Inequality generates parallel, separate lives and thus makes shared citizenship impossible. "The new inequality gives rise (...) to increasingly separate ways of living. Wealthy professionals gradually withdraw from public life into 'homogeneous enclaves' where they have little contact with those less fortunate than themselves. As public parks and playgrounds deteriorate, private wellness centres and golf, tennis and skating clubs accessible only to paying members multiply. While the children of the rich enrol in public schools or relatively homogeneous schools in residential suburbs, the city's public schools are left to the poor' (p. 230). Sandel makes explicit what is still implicit in Barry: the secession of the rich is a moral secession before being a territorial one. It is not just a separation of space, it is a separation of responsibility. And when destiny is no longer shared, the very foundation of social justice dissolves.

The relationship Barry traces between inequality and the structural collapse of trust is crucial because it helps to understand why an unequal society is not only unjust but also ungovernable. Sandel is also convinced of this. "The secession of the rich," he writes, "erodes civic virtue [and] a society of extremes lacks the 'spirit of friendship' that self-government requires" (p. 244). This is why an unequal society is not only a redistributive problem, but a democratic failure. In a recent interview, he stated 'A new politics of the common good would require rethinking the civic infrastructure of common life in order to build institutions that foster intermingling between social classes, from sports facilities to public parks and recreation areas, from town halls to municipal swimming pools, from public libraries to public transport. It is through encounters, which encourage the mixing of people from different social backgrounds, that we learn to manage and accept our differences. And that is how we come to care about the common good. If we do not see and interact with people from different social classes, it is very difficult to come to care about them or recognise what unites us. That is why an important part of a new politics of the common good is the deliberate attempt to create public places and communal spaces, institutions that bring social classes together, that bring people together and break down isolation" ("Disparate Communities. Interview with Michael Sandel". Pandora Magazine, 18 November 2025). If common spaces disappear, democracy goes out.

Without commonality, encounter, relationship we will have increasingly unequal societies unable to treat citizens as equals. We will increasingly have societies of winners and losers. Societies incompatible with an authentically democratic life. "In essence," Barry concludes, "the social pathology of a highly unequal society consists in the destructive effect that inequality has on social solidarity: the knowledge that those who live together share a common destiny and should work together. Contempt for the interests of others becomes the norm' (2005, p. 154).

An unequal society can also be rich, dynamic, competitive. But it cannot be democratic, because democracy is made of proximity: of lives that brush against each other, of shared places, of occasions where difference does not become distance but dialogue. When distance grows beyond a certain threshold, that proximity evaporates. And with it evaporates the moral space in which each recognises the dignity of the other as an equal, as a fellow citizen. The quest for social justice is necessary, then, not because everyone must be equal, but to allow everyone to feel equally part of the same society. Not just to inhabit it, but to inhabit it together.

The central question is therefore not so much about the choice of the optimal level, higher or lower, of redistribution. The central question has to do with the choice of whether to imagine a future made up of separate, indifferent, incommunicable islands or another in which we return to the idea that living together really means sharing the same destiny. Aware that democracy dies when we stop valuing the encounter with the other, their destiny as much as our own.