邦訳：2025年2月・明石書店This book takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, to the classic nineteenth - century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today.