In Inequality in Canada Eric Sager considers one of the defining – but hardest to define – ideas of our era and traces its different meanings and contexts across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Sager shows how the idea of inequality arose in the long evolution in Britain and the United States from classical economics to the emerging welfare economics of the twentieth century. Within this transatlantic frame, inequality took a distinct form in Canada: different iterations of the idea appear in Protestant critiques of wealth, labour movements, farmer-progressive politics, the social gospel, social Catholicism in Quebec, English-Canadian political economy, and political and intellectual justifications of the social security state. A tradition of idealist thought persisted in the twentieth century, sustaining the idea of inequality despite deep silences among Canadian economists. Sager argues that inequality goes beyond the distribution of income and wealth: it is the idea that there are wide gaps between rich and poor, that the gaps are both an economic problem and a social injustice, and that when inequality appears, it is as a problem that can be either eliminated or reduced.

It is precisely because inequality appears in different contexts, and because it changes, Sager reasons, that we can begin to perceive the contours and cleavages of inequality in our time. In our century, a political solution to inequality may rest on the recovery of an ethical ideal and egalitarian politics that have long preoccupied the history of Canadian thought.

Eric W. Sager is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria and author of Seafaring Labour: The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada, 1820–1914.

Eric W. Sager's profile page

• Winner, Canadian Historical Association 2021 Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize

"As we think about where we have been and where we want to be, one useful starting place is Eric Sager's Inequality in Canada, which offers a detailed account of how politicians, preachers, economists, and editorialists have articulated and debated the issue since colonial days. Sager's concluding chapter, "To Explore and to Know Again," is so passionate, wise, sad, and engaging that readers should try to stay with him to the end." Literary Review of Canada

"This is intellectual history at its best and Eric Sager is at the top of his game: confident, but never arrogant, comfortable with his sources, and critical, in the best sense of that word. Inequality in Canada is a masterful piece of scholarship." Donald Wright, University of New Brunswick

"The book is a wake-up call to anyone who thinks that concern about inequality is new. Sager skillfully identifies how inequality was conceived and also how it failed to be conceived. He carefully traces intellectual debts to different historical conditions and material circumstances. It's an extraordinary accomplishment." E.A. Heaman, McGill University