ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explains what inequality means and provides a deeper understanding of why inequality exists. As shown by work in the Citispyce project, the past years of austerity policy have already caused a lot of inequality, with consequences in particular for young people. As only people can make their own history and as inequality expresses a social relation, inequality has to be caused by somebody with some kind of will to do it. Furthermore, as history is made under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past, causes of inequality can also be inherent in such circumstances, the forms of them as well as their materialities (the formal and the material cause in the Aristotelian typology) and the history behind them. The author puts us on track towards an answer by making the important distinction between potential and actual causes of inequality.
