Can equality be for everyone? The question sounds like a contradiction in terms, but this new history of equality encourages us to ask it. Defining equality is difficult, partly because it has meant very different things to different groups throughout history. Not only that, but equality is also plagued by contradictions, principally the idea that if human beings are all unique, how can we all be equal?
McMahon’s history begins with early human societies, tracking the development of equality from socially equal hunter-gatherers to the “great disequalisation” that followed the emergence of sedentary agricultural communities. Property meant power, and power meant domination. Here, the author reads the Book of Genesis anthropologically as “a kind of elegy or mourning for a way of life that has been lost”, with Adam and Eve (the original hunter-gatherers) forced into a world of toil.
During the Axial Age (800-300 BCE), which witnessed the birth of the world’s main religious and philosophical traditions, equality as an idea emerged. The Stoics were the first to state explicitly that all humans are equal, what America’s founding fathers would later declare to be a self-evident truth. However, at this time it was necessary to affirm it, not just because within early civilisations “inequality had reached a breaking point”, but also because, as we see throughout this work, equality claims are “largely a human contrivance and representation”.
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An exception to the general historical norm of inequality was ancient Greece. Athens fervently preached the gospel of equality, had progressive taxation, and instituted sumptuary laws to prevent conspicuous displays of wealth. Sparta, too, while allowing for hierarchical discrimination, had within its citizen-soldier elite an ethos of likeness, reciprocity and equality. Crucially, however, equality in ancient Greece was “always relative, always selective, and always based on difference with unequals”. For Athenians and Spartans, equality at home meant domination abroad.
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Even though inequality was the rule in the society of ancient Rome, equality before the law was a central tenet of its legal system. Similarly, the Christian perspective that the slave and the free man were one in Christ Jesus (to paraphrase St Paul) also treated equality as an abstraction that was independent of one’s real-life situation.
Like communists, fascists rejected liberal democracy and social equality, but equality was central to the mobilisation of their followers
The Age of Enlightenment witnessed the reinvention of Christian equality as a social and political goal. Jean-Jacques Rousseau replaced the notion that men were rightly unequal because of the fall with the conviction that society could be remade to ensure liberty and equality for all. The French Revolution attempted this great levelling, but also revealed its limits. The newly constituted National Assembly distinguished immediately between “active” and “passive” citizens, based on gender and wealth. Once again, the assertion of equality generated inequalities and domination in the process.
If equality had been the credo of the French Revolution, the post-revolutionary reaction was swift and universal. From Napoleon to early socialists, such as Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, equality as extreme levelling was decried as a “social poison”. For Marx, equality was at odds with the cultivation of individual gifts; for Engels, it was both a bourgeois and a proletarian prejudice. Equality has nonetheless continued to this day as the key moral idea of all forms of socialism.
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The relationship between the right and equality is no less contradictory. Like communists, fascists rejected liberal democracy and social equality, but equality was central to the mobilisation of their followers. Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt pointed to the contradiction of equality in democratic society which, he argued, must always be based on an explicit rejection of non-equals. In Schmitt’s words, the Nazis had the “courage” to follow through on this and treat non-equals unequally (and with horrifying results).
The final chapter connects the American history of slavery, segregation and the struggles for civil rights to contemporary questions of equality and identity that emerged with second-wave feminism in the 1960s. While excluded groups since the 18th century sought equality on the basis of similarity (because “all men are created equal”), today’s equality is sought on the basis of difference, “an extraordinary, even utopian, departure from previous understandings of the term”. Contemporary politics has transformed equality into “an insistence on the right to diversity”, a definition that is as pithy as it is paradoxical.
Ultimately, McMahon’s work shows us that we are more conflicted about equality than we might think. With erudition and style, he reveals the contradictions and hypocrisy, the hopes and dreams, that lie behind an idea of great importance to the unequal societies of our unequal world.
James Hanrahan is associate professor of French studies at Trinity College Dublin
