Abstract
The analysis of spatial disparities has quite a long tradition in human geography and other social sciences; it has been among the major research issues of several disciplines for decades. Browsing the works written by geographers, economists, sociologists, or even experts of political sciences, one can find a great many contributions related to what is called spatial “differentiation”, “disparity”, “inequality”, “injustice” or “unevenness”. In the vast body of literature, however, the exact meaning of these terms, certainly all concerning the inhomogeneity of space and the peculiarity of places, remains unclear, especially as such expressions are often considered as synonymous, either explicitly or implicitly (Hinderink and Sterkenburg 1978). For this reason we find it important to have an overview of the various forms of geographical differences, and to introduce clear terminology first, which we can use in our essay to avoid misunderstandings.
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- 1.
In fact, this kind of reasoning still exists, even if it has been exiled by now from the domain of science due to changing power geometries in the production of knowledge. After the destructive 2011 earthquake in Japan, Tokyo’s Governor called the disaster a “tembatsu” (divine punishment) for “egoism and populism” tainting Japanese politics and as well as the Japanese people (The Japan Times 2011). US conservative radio host Glenn Beck also interpreted the catastrophe as “a message being sent” by God to follow the Ten Commandments (Hartenstein 2011). Of course it speaks volumes that, unlike would have presumably happened some centuries ago, both persons had to face fierce criticism for their words.
- 2.
It is important to underline a terminological issue at this point for the dualistic meaning of “differentiation” in geographical research. Spatial differentiation is interpreted in our essay as state of unevenness, in line with the approach of Ward (2009a). In the theoretical literature dealing with regionalization, however, spatial differentiation has another meaning. It refers there to the act of “dividing up” space, so of differentiating, distinguishing various parts of the world from each other for analytical or administrative reasons. For the latter use of the term see Entrikin (2011).
- 3.
In countries belonging to the former “Western” and “Eastern” Blocs during the Cold War, the meaning of the term “social and economic disparities” is somewhat different. In the former context, social disparities refer to differences in status and privilege, and to an unequal access to resources. On the contrary, economic disparities embrace the unequal distribution of economy in space through the division of labor and functional differentiation. In post-socialist countries, however, whether one speaks about “social”, “social and economic” or “economic” disparities also has a political relevance and might mirror one’s point concerning issues of the politics of science. This is because in the communist period Marxist-Leninist geography entitled “economic” all issues other than physical (Gyuris and Győri 2013). Such an approach was based on the concept that it was conscious work distinguishing human from animals, which led to an overemphasis of production and the subordination of “society” to “economy”. For the same reason, to keep distance from the Communist system, many researchers began after the post-socialist political shift to argue for defining “social geography” as a “higher category” than “economic geography”, where the latter was claimed only to be a subset of the former (Timár 2006). Although in many cases the hybrid term of “social and economic geography” was to follow Marxist-Leninist “economic geography”, the use of this expression is often exposed to criticism by those firmly rejecting Marxism-Leninism. For such a term is either regarded by them as “logically incorrect” (since, for them, “economic” is a part of “social”), or as the proof of a pseudo-Marxist-Leninist stance (where keeping the adjective “economic” at the same level as “social” reflects an opposition to acknowledging “economy” as subordinate to “society”). In the recent work, we refer to “social and economic disparities” in the Western sense, without any implicit political notions.
- 4.
Although the concept of power itself is also difficult to describe and its definitions in the literature are manifold and highly diverse (for a detailed overview on various notions see Avelino and Rotmans 2009), we use the term here in a broad sense, accepting the definition of Avelino and Rotmans (2009). Their concept is similar to that of Parsons (1963, 1967) to some extent since they define power as the ability of actors to mobilize resources to achieve a certain goal. Differently to Parsons, however, their understanding of resources is rather broad, not only including material resources, but all sorts of human, mental, monetary, artifactual and natural resources.
- 5.
This does not mean that societal systems above a few hundred people cannot come into being at all without a written culture. But the efficiency of communication and, consequently, of coordination here is unavoidably much lower. The number of face-to-face interactions the instructions of the leader need to go through until they can be received by all subordinates dramatically increases, which radically increases the possibility of distortions. (Obviously, the same goes for reactions coming from the subordinates.) Hence, the emergence of a well-organized society and state is not possible without at least a certain fraction of society being literate.
- 6.
It is important to underline that the increase in the division of labor and the complexity of society is barely a balanced process at a permanent pace, but rather a series of rapid shifts with long and relatively “moderate” phases in between. The Neolithic Revolution or the Industrial Revolution, for instance, witnessed a thoroughly rising complexity of society otherwise unprecedented for much longer historical epochs (Meusburger 1998a). Still, although the process is volatile, the continuous increase in the complexity of society is to be regarded as a fact, just as that the amplitude of shifts increases and the duration of moderate periods between these shifts decreases over time.
- 7.
In this work we use the term “social strata” instead of “social class”, which at least in the continental European context usually has a Marxist connotation.
- 8.
Although it is not absolutely zero. One of the few counterexamples was the Treckboers in South Africa. They were descendants of Dutch, German and French Huguenot immigrants, who had been farmers before leaving Europe. In South Africa, however, they were forced by unfavorable climatic conditions in the coastal regions to landlocked areas where their former economic activities were not to sustain any more. Thus, adapting to the aridity of their new land, they shifted to nomadic pastoralism during the eighteenth century (Waibel 1933). In fact, similar changes take place in societies that, after the fall of an empire they belonged to, witness a decline in administration, political uncertainty, and a decreasing complexity of societal structures (e.g. in the former Roman provinces of Britannia and Pannonia after the empire collapsed). Of course, such dramatic changes happen only in exceptional cases under extreme circumstances.
- 9.
Livingstone, actually, focuses on problems which emerge easily while the history of geographical thought is analyzed. From our point of view, however, many of his remarks have relevance for the history of any sorts of thought.
- 10.
In this study, the selection of philosophers mainly focuses on those conventionally regarded in political science, philosophy and history as key thinkers regarding equality and inequality. For this, we have found especially useful the works of Bluhm (2007) in Llanque and Münkler (2007), a broadly-used textbook in the university education of political science and political philosophy. A valuable overview of the history of the concept of equality is also given by Dann (1975) in Brunner et al. (1972). The latter series, which was published again in 2004 without modifications, counts as a much-cited scientific work in the disciplines of history, philosophy and political science.
- 11.
In a remarkable way, growing interest in social disparities did not lead to an increasing attention to spatial inequalities. Although social and spatial disparities are coeval, spatial inequality as a problem was brought into the focus of thinkers more than 2,000 years later than was the case with social disparities. While the debate over social disparities began in ancient Greece, a similarly significant attention was not paid to spatial inequalities until the nineteenth century. Reasons for this are to be discussed in Chap 3.
- 12.
Further criticism is levelled at the concept’s controversies by Karl Popper (1945), who was convinced that Plato’s views would unavoidably lead to tyranny. As Pfetsch (2003) puts it, however, Popper’s critique is also one-sided and tendentious, and a detailed evaluation of his stance does not belong to the aims of the recent work. From our aspect, the main point is that in The Laws Plato was an explicit advocate of social equality instead of disparity, although (or even if) his concept about an ideal state was still not absolutely egalitarian.
- 13.
In this sense, the master and his student had quite similar attitudes regarding real societies under real-world circumstances. Thus, we agree with those researchers who interpret Aristotle as the person continuing and improving the concepts of Plato with a stronger emphasis on real conditions, instead opposing his master (on the debate over the relation of the notions of Aristotle and Plato, see Wiser 1983; Pfetsch 2003).
- 14.
It is worth noting at this point that the United States was a remarkable exception, despite the manifold influence the American philosophical and political tradition exerted on national traditions in Europe concerning the issue of freedom. The 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, the cornerstone of the newly emerging US legal order, only stated that “all men are by nature equally free and independent” (which was a statement with limited “range”, given that it referred exclusively to white men and in the succeeding decades proved in practice compatible with slavery). Equality is otherwise not mentioned in the bill, neither as equality before the law nor as an equal distribution of properties (Dann 1975).
- 15.
It should be underlined that the philosophical boom in Europe with regard to disparities rather meant the rapid gain of the issue in popularity than the emergence of a brand new topic. Reformation as well as anti-feudal peasants’ revolts had already indicated the importance of the problem, and the slogans propagated by the leaders of Medieval anti-feudal revolts planted the seeds of philosophical debates later on.
- 16.
Landowners, for example, can leave their lands to their children, but employees cannot do the same with their workplace, which is their main source of income.
- 17.
A detailed description of the discourse on equality in Germany from the late eighteenth century on (although with emphases different to those of our paper) is given by Dann (1975). We have to emphasize that neither the democratic idea of political equality nor democratic communities were without predecessors in German speaking territories (for the latter a peculiar example was the Landsgemeinde, an early form of direct democracy in Swiss cantons, and, until the Napoleonic Wars, in the Bregenzerwald Region of Austria). In intellectual debates, however, the topic had attracted little attention until the French Revolution.
- 18.
A more detailed description of the extension of voting rights in various European countries is to be found in Acemoglu and Robinson (2000).
- 19.
- 20.
This does not necessarily mean an absolute lack of inequalities. In Marxist interpretation, certain disparities can exist even within classless societies. Senior members of tribes, for instance, can have more influence on decision-making over the life of tribe due to the respect they enjoy. However, the forces of production are owned by the community, which, in the Marxist approach, means that nobody can be excluded from their use. In consequence, such deep and stable inequalities cannot emerge as those in class societies (see Niedermaier 2009).
- 21.
This is the stance usually described as “social Darwinism” in the literature (Paul 2009). Yet, I do not use this term in the text since this extreme laissez-faire conservatism was basically not rooted in Darwin’s ideas, from which they utilized many slogans. Instead, they could rather be traced back to some concepts of the “neo-Lamarckians” (Paul 2009; cf. Bowler 1990; Hofstadter 1944; Moore 1985). They followed the pre-Darwinian French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in thinking that organisms acquire new characteristics as the result of a process of active adaptation to their environments (Paul 2009). It was their conviction that, as formulated by the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, “the whole effort of nature is to get rid of such [the “unfit”], to clear the world of them, to make room for better” (Spencer 1970[1851], p. 379; cited by Paul 2009, p. 232). The quick spread of this idea was partly thanks to the skyrocketing popularity of Darwin’s works, which, although not “neo-Lamarckian”, opened the way for other evolutionary concepts as well. That is why many superficial observers identified Darwinism with evolutionism (Paul 2009).
- 22.
The following five paragraphs are generally based on a more detailed overview in Marxhausen (2010, pp. 40–45).
- 23.
In contrast to social identity, personal identity is related to “specific attributes of the individual” (Turner 1982, p. 18.). Such attributes can be “competence, bodily attributes, ways of relating to others, psychological characteristics, intellectual concerns, personal tastes” etc. (ibid.).
- 24.
The possible evaluation of “consolidated” and “emerging” discourses is thoroughly different if the question is to what extent they enable one to express one’s own opinion without constraints. This is for at least two reasons. First, since “consolidated” discourses offer prefabricated slogans, newcomers are constrained to use these, although maybe none of these slogans is feasible in exactly grasping one’s point of view. Second, in “consolidated” discourses slogans are so strongly and directly linked to characteristic underlying positions that using a slogan automatically pushes one into a characteristic political category. Thus, articulating sophisticated views and avoiding black-and-white thinking is very difficult or even impossible within these “consolidated” discourses.
- 25.
According to its official website, Captus is an “independent…free-market think tank that promotes the ideas of liberty such as free enterprise, low taxes and individual liberty” (Captus 2011).
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Gyuris, F. (2014). The Debate Over Social Disparities and the Disparity Discourse. In: The Political Discourse of Spatial Disparities. Contributions to Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01508-8_2
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