How Does Economic Theory Write the History of Income Inequality? A Critical Perspective Based on History, Ideology and Politics

Résumé

This study interrogates how economics, across its historical evolution, has operated not as a neutral science of wealth but as an ideological apparatus that constructs, legitimizes, and perpetuates inequality. By tracing the epistemic lineage from classical political economy to neoliberal globalization, it demonstrates how the discipline transformed relations of domination into relations of efficiency—translating moral questions of justice into the technical language of equilibrium. Each paradigm—Smithian harmony, Ricardian scarcity, Keynesian compromise, developmental modernism, and neoliberal moralism—performed a depoliticizing function: converting exploitation into productivity, class antagonism into policy adjustment, and hierarchy into merit. Through a critical–historical and ideological lens, the paper situates these transformations within their institutional and geopolitical contexts, revealing how the claim of scientific neutrality repeatedly served to naturalize capitalist power. The postwar welfare and developmental paradigms reimagined inequality as a transitional cost of modernization, while neoliberalism universalized it as virtue—embedding hierarchy in the global moral economy of competition, merit, and markets. Contemporary discourses of sustainability and inclusion, rather than transcending this logic, rebrand exploitation as progress. Ultimately, the paper argues that inequality is not an aberration of capitalism but its constitutive logic, sustained through the epistemic authority of economics itself. Reclaiming equality therefore requires reclaiming political economy as critique—reviving its emancipatory capacity to unveil the moral alchemy through which capitalism sanctifies injustice in the name of progress.