Inequality is a fundamental reality of the modern world-system as it has been of every known historical system. What is different, what is particular to historical capitalism, is that equality has been proclaimed as its objective, and indeed as its achievement—equality in the marketplace, equality before the law, the fundamental social equality of all individuals endowed with equal rights. The great political question of the modern world, the great cultural question, has been how to reconcile the theoretical embrace of equality with the continuing and increasingly acute polarization of real-life opportunities and satisfactions that has been its outcome.
