Narrative and Numbers: Edward Bellamy, Tony Judt, and the Political Economy of Inequality in the United States

Abstract

This article analyzes two commentaries on the problem of inequality in American life: Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) and historian Tony Judt’s social scientific Ill Fares the Land (2010). Both texts address the causes and consequences of inequality in the distribution of income, but they also raise the larger problem of framing inequality in American political discourse. Drawing on a vast body of literature produced by social scientists and journalists in the wake of the 2008 crash and subsequent recession, the authors suggest that we may have exhausted the utility of economic regulation by nation states, and they advocate a move to a more global understanding of the origins of structural inequality and its remediation.