It’s no criticism of the other presenters at a recent seminar on political populism hosted by King’s College London’s Policy Institute and the Fairness Foundation – it was a consistently energising discussion – that (for me at least) the most striking comment was this from Liam Byrne MP:
“There’s a real inequality of dignity [in the UK] today. People who were prepared to fight for the dignity of working people would go a long way [politically].”
Byrne chairs the House of Commons Business & Trade Select Committee and went on to describe the committee’s recent work. In particular, he has been struck by the strong public reaction to the Committee challenging companies that are seen to have been acting unfairly. He sees this as evidence of a real thirst for a body that seeks to inject more fairness into the relationship of business with society.
This blog is of course all for such an injection of fairness, but this post in particular is about the question Byrne raises about the inequality in dignity. What might we mean by the term, and how might we address that particular area of inequality, of unfairness?
Fortunately, there’s an academic who has dedicated her career to considering dignity, who is permitted to benefit from it, and how it can be reinforced. She is Michèle Lamont, Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies and the Robert I Goldman Professor of European Studies at Harvard University. A proud French Canadian, she feels a profound affinity with those at the periphery of societies. Her work largely focuses on the US, but she collaborates internationally and the lessons to be learned are global.
Lamont says at one point in her latest book, Seeing Others, that it is an “exploration of how we decide who matters”; that description really applies to most of her work. The phrase for me is both encouraging and profoundly unsettling at the same time. If we are to deliver the equality of dignity that Byrne is in effect seeking then we need all people to matter, not just those we decide are worthy of dignity. That is Lamont’s aspiration too, but she recognises the reality that we are far away from that point currently: it’s not by chance that the subtitle of Seeing Others is How to Redefine Worth in a Divided World.
Seeing Others is mostly focused on further-educated members of Gen Z and their efforts to recognise the worth of others. Byrne discusses their deliberately inclusive disclosure of pronouns, which has become such a target for some – opponents of the approach ironically seeing it as exclusionary, in contrast to its inclusive intentions. But earlier work was more directly concerned with the perspectives of the working class – in particular The Dignity of Working Men.
Lamont’s core finding in that book is that people create their own framework of dignity for their lives, and the camaraderie of working life together reinforces it. Morality lies at the heart of this sense of self, in the form of straight-talking honesty and a strong self-discipline – importantly, these are characteristics that they believe are lacking in many of their bosses and those of higher social status (they are only partly believers in American meritocracy). Lamont finds that “morality plays an extremely prominent role in workers’ descriptions of who they are and, more important, who they are not. It helps workers to maintain a sense of self-worth, to affirm their dignity independently of their relatively low social status, and to locate themselves above others.” Providing for and protecting their family lies at the core of this moral life, not least because it is “a realm of life that gives them intrinsic satisfaction and validation – which is crucial when work is not rewarding and offers limited opportunities”.
Byrne himself in his excellent recent book The Inequality of Wealth doesn’t much deal with these issues of dignity. Subtitled Why it matters and how to fix it, the book is much more trying to develop a prescription for addressing broader unfairness in our society. But there is one discussion that is very relevant. Tellingly in a chapter called The Cost of Affluence, Byrne discusses the work of psychologist Dacher Keltner, whose experiments explore the sense of fellow feeling and the willingness of strangers to support one another. He quotes Keltner as saying: “we’ve done several studies that look at how your wealth, education and prestige of your career or family predict generosity. And the results are consistent: poorer people assist other people more than wealthy people.” Here too is a source of dignity – and also an indication that working people are right to be cynical about the morality of those better off than themselves.
The Dignity of Working Men was published in 2000, but its interviews date back to 1992 and 1993. And some of the comments feel all of their 30-plus years of age. In particular, this comment from postal worker Steve Dupont, who argues with his immediate boss on a regular basis, feels like it comes from a very distant time: “This has gotten me in trouble but as I always say to [my foreman], ‘I can always find another job, I can’t always recoup my pride and my own dignity.’” There may have been an element of bravado then, but now not even the most bragging of working men would feel able to assert their ability always to find another job.
And that seems to be the core of the dignity deficit: when the ability to stand up for what is right, when self-discipline isn’t enough to avoid being restructured out of employment, then there is little basis for this traditional source of dignity and pride. Where it is no longer possible, even with hard work and discipline, to protect and provide for one’s family, dignity becomes less possible too.
One consequence of this dignity deficit is a nationalistic fervour. In The Dignity of Working Men, Lamont finds that “Being an American is one of the high-status signals that workers have access to”. She amplifies this finding in Seeing Others: populist political messages “extend to downwardly mobile people one of the few high-status identities available to them: their “winning” status as Americans”.
There’s a danger if this loss of dignity goes too far. A sense of humiliation is probably the opposite of the sense of dignity. And humiliation is a dangerous feeling. A recent excellent paper published by the wonderful people at Psyche discusses the impacts of humiliation at a national level – or at least the impacts of narratives of national humiliation. These are the fuel for conflict, finds author Raamy Majeed (a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Manchester). His title, Does national humiliation explain why wars break out?, expresses where the loss of dignity may end. “When citizens of a nation feel humiliated, they become more likely to support aggressive foreign policy initiatives.” Fairness (naturally!) can lean against this sense; Majeed reports on the work of philosopher Avishai Margalit, especially in The Decent Society, which “argues that a just society does not necessarily prevent its citizens from feeling humiliated but instead avoids creating humiliating conditions”.
Even short of conflict, there are direct physical consequences of the inequality in dignity. In Seeing Others, Lamont makes a clear link to the work of Anne Case and Angus Deaton on deaths of despair: “dignity affects quality of life just as much as material resources do”.
So we need to address the dignity deficit. A just society will help limit humiliation, but are there other prescriptions from Lamont’s work? She attempts exactly that in her conclusion to Seeing Others, a chapter entitled Strengthening our Capacity to Live Better Together, and she is exploring it in her current work, which she calls a study of the three Manchesters (Oldham, near Manchester in the UK; Greater Manchester, New Hampshire; and Tampere in Finland, nicknamed the Manchester of the North; all former centres of industry). At a talk this month at the London School of Economics, Lamont discussed both Seeing Others and this three Manchesters work, which is considering how working class 18-30 year olds seek and gain recognition – another term for dignity perhaps – and the role of place, history, politics, exclusion and inclusion in that.
It’s too early to have conclusions from the Manchesters work, but the conclusion to Seeing Others does provide some insight. Much of this is relatively vague, emphasising the need for shared visions, hopes and narratives – and at its most simple, shared existences, rather than living very segregated lives. There is a hint at emphasising the proud inclusivism in national stories, rather than the exclusive aspects of them. Lamont also calls for the middle-classes not to ‘opportunity hoard’ as much as they (I should say we) do. She gets more specific when she says (without acknowledging the element of division she is encouraging):
“The Democratic Party could make significant gains by regaining working-class voters with not only redistributive policies, but also with messages of solidarity and dignity, as an alternative to the Republican Party’s populist messages of division and blame. Redirecting working-class anger toward the one percent is more likely to sustain fruitful alliances than driving wedges between diverse categories of workers who have so much in common.”
In the absence of such efforts, and the absence of efforts to build a shared sense of community, it may be no surprise that a lack of fairness in dignity, echoing wider unfairness in society, is fuelling political and social tensions. Many people have the sense that the status status quo isn’t working for them, and are willing to see dramatic change as a result. Byrne is right, we need to be working to close the dignity deficit, to instil a greater fairness, an equality, in dignity.
I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour
See also: Deaton’s economics: fair criticism?
The pursuit of happiness
Meritocracy’s unfair
Trapped by expectations: the poverty of ambition
The centre cannot hold
The Return of Trump: is inequality behind the rise of the populist president?, King’s College London’s Policy Institute and the Fairness Foundation, 4 February 2025
The quoted passage is at around the 68th minute (but as I say it is all worth listening to!)
Seeing Others: How to Redefine Worth in a Divided World, Michèle Lamont, Allen Lane, 2023
The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration, Michèle Lamont, Harvard University Press, 2000
The Inequality of Wealth: Why it matters and how to fix it, Liam Byrne, Head of Zeus, 2024
Does national humiliation explain why wars break out?, Raamy Majeed, Psyche, 27 March 2025
The Decent Society, Avishai Margalit, Harvard University Press, 1996
Global dignity and seeing others, London School of Economics, 1 April 2025
The Sense of Fairness blog 