ABSTRACT
Over the last two decades, a classical sociological topic has been reintroduced into social science discourse and public policy debates. Economists, political scientists, sociologists, and specialists in international politics came to realize the explosive potentials of inequality. Since the Washington Consensus of the 1980s offered “market solutions” to all economic, political, and social problems by systematically turning a blind eye to questions of equity and distribution, this marks a significant change. It directly counters the long-prevailing view of globalization as the great equalizer between rich and poor countries. At the same time, this new attention to inequality is a challenge to those sociological theorists who doubted that class structures and distribution conflicts were still relevant in the life world of late capitalism ( Habermas 1981: 349–351).
