Review of Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-first Century

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-first Century’s thesis is that violence and only violence significantly reduces inequality. It shows supportive cases of violence reducing inequality, especially World War II and the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, and highlights recent peacetime increases in within-country inequality. The great virtue of the book is to present a lot of evidence on both...