The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx

We often frame societal risks in terms of immediate, visible threats: pandemics, climate disasters, or geopolitical conflicts. Yet one of humanity’s most persistent dangers—economic inequality—rarely occupies the same urgency in public discourse.

David Lay Williams’ compelling book, The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx, challenges this oversight by excavating an important truth: for over two millennia, the West’s greatest minds have sounded alarms about concentrated wealth’s corrosive effects on societies.

From Plato’s warning that inequality creates “two cities — one of the rich, one of the poor, eternally at war” to Adam Smith’s fear that vast income gaps erode mutual sympathy between classes, history’s sharpest thinkers have identified economic disparity as an existential threat to justice, democracy, and human flourishing.

At this event, David Lay Williams and an expert panel discussed what we can learn from the past about the threat of economic inequality, why philosophers considered it so disruptive and destabilising, and how we can make this threat more tangible to provoke action.

Speakers:

• David Lay Williams, Professor of Political Science at DePaul University and Affiliate at the University of Chicago's Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility
• Karen Rowlingson, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Professor of Social Policy at the University of York
• Luke Kemp, Research Affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Cambridge
• Will Snell, Chief Executive at the Fairness Foundation (chair)

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