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Resumo

This article concerns the generation of a particular kind of inequality through social practices of inclusion and exclusion. It argues that we need to examine political as well as economic motivations to explain inequality, and it shows, using the case of Russian history, how political anxieties about the integrity of social groups and their governability has served to create inequality by disadvantaging those excluded. The theoretical approach taken is a dynamic and social one, taking up Dunn's observations on the continued salience of Hobbes in today's world and Kharkhordin's Foucauldian analysis of 20th-century Russian collectivism. Inequality, in this light, is seen as something that can be produced by political emotions and discursive practices, rather than as a fixed situation to be explained in terms of income disparities, unequal rights, or structures of exploitation. The intention is not to displace these other accounts but to supplement them by drawing attention to the ways in which a political impulse for the preservation of society constantly reviews the criteria of conformist unity and thus continually resets the boundaries for defining insiders against the outside. Variegated categories of the dispossessed are thereby created historically, and they form multiple sediments at the 'bottom' or the 'peripheries' of the wider polity. Among ordinary people, fear of being excluded, and ambivalent sentiments to those who have been expelled, give rise to volatile judgements about the legitimacy of inequality – especially when (as in the contemporary turmoil in Russia) certain of the previously dispossessed suddenly take their chance to grasp wealth.

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