equality in democracy essay

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This article is concerned with social and political equality. In its prescriptive usage, ‘equality’ is a highly contested concept. Its normally positive connotation gives it a rhetorical power suitable for use in political slogans (Westen 1990). At least since the French Revolution, equality has served as one of the leading ideals of the body politic; in this respect, it is at present probably the most controversial of the great social ideals. There is controversy concerning the precise notion of equality, the relation of justice and equality (the principles of equality), the material requirements and measure of the ideal of equality (equality of what?), the extension of equality (equality among whom?), and its status within a comprehensive (liberal) theory of justice (the value of equality). This article will discuss each of these issues in turn.

1. Defining the Concept

2.1 formal equality, 2.2 proportional equality, 2.3 moral equality, 2.4 presumption of equality, 3.1 simple equality and objections to equality in general, 3.2 libertarianism, 3.3 utilitarianism, 3.4 equality of welfare, 3.5 equality of resources, 3.6 responsibility and luck-egalitarianism, 3.7 equality of opportunity for welfare or advantage, 3.8 capabilities approaches, 4. relational equality, 5. equality among whom, 6.1. kinds of egalitarianism, 6.2 equality vs. priority or sufficiency, other internet resources, related entries.

‘Equality’ is a contested concept: “People who praise it or disparage it disagree about what they are praising or disparaging” (Dworkin 2000, p. 2). Our first task is therefore to provide a clear definition of equality in the face of widespread misconceptions about its meaning as a political idea. The terms ‘equality’ (Greek: isotes ; Latin: aequitas , aequalitas ; French: égalité ; German Gleichheit ), ‘equal’, and ‘equally’ signify a qualitative relationship. ‘Equality’ (or ‘equal’) signifies correspondence between a group of different objects, persons, processes or circumstances that have the same qualities in at least one respect, but not all respects, i.e., regarding one specific feature, with differences in other features. ‘Equality’ must then be distinguished from ‘identity’, which refers to one and the same object corresponding to itself in all its features. For the same reason, it needs to be distinguished from ‘similarity’ – the concept of merely approximate correspondence (Dann 1975, p. 997; Menne 1962, p. 44 ff.; Westen 1990, pp. 39, 120). Thus, to say that men are equal, for example, is not to say that they are identical. Equality implies similarity rather than ‘sameness’.

Judgements of equality presume a difference between the things compared. According to this definition, the notion of ‘complete’ or ‘absolute’ equality may be seen as problematic because it would violate the presumption of a difference. Two non-identical objects are never completely equal; they are different at least in their spatiotemporal location. If things do not differ they should not be called ‘equal’, but rather, more precisely, ‘identical’, such as the morning and the evening star. Here usage might vary. Some authors do consider absolute qualitative equality admissible as a borderline concept (Tugendhat & Wolf 1983, p. 170).

‘Equality’ can be used in the very same sense both to describe and prescribe, as with ‘thin’: “you are thin” and “you are too thin”. The approach taken to defining the standard of comparison for both descriptive and prescriptive assertions of equality is very important (Oppenheim 1970). In the descriptive case, the common standard is itself descriptive, for example when two people are said to have the same weight. In the prescriptive use, the standard prescribes a norm or rule, for example when it is said people ought to be equal before the law. The standards grounding prescriptive assertions of equality contain at least two components. On the one hand, there is a descriptive component, since the assertions need to contain descriptive criteria, in order to identify those people to which the rule or norm applies. The question of this identification – who belongs to which category? – may itself be normative, as when we ask to whom the U.S. laws apply. On the other hand, the comparative standards contain something normative – a moral or legal rule, such as the U.S. laws – specifying how those falling under the norm are to be treated. Such a rule constitutes the prescriptive component (Westen 1990, chap. 3). Sociological and economic analyses of (in-)equality mainly pose the questions of how inequalities can be determined and measured and what their causes and effects are. In contrast, social and political philosophy is in general concerned mainly with the following questions: what kind of equality, if any, should obtain, and with respect to whom and when ? Such is the case in this article as well.

‘Equality’ and ‘equal’ are incomplete predicates that necessarily generate one question: equal in what respect? (Rae 1980,p. 132 f.) Equality essentially consists of a tripartite relation between two (or several) objects or persons and one (or several) qualities. Two objects A and B are equal in a certain respect if, in that respect, they fall under the same general term. ‘Equality’ denotes the relation between the objects compared. Every comparison presumes a tertium comparationis , a concrete attribute defining the respect in which the equality applies – equality thus referring to a common sharing of this comparison-determining attribute. This relevant comparative standard represents a ‘variable’ (or ‘index’) of the concept of equality that needs to be specified in each particular case (Westen 1990, p. 10); differing conceptions of equality here emerge from one or another descriptive or normative moral standard. There is another source of diversity as well: As Temkin (1986, 1993, 2009) argues, various different standards might be used to measure inequality, with the respect in which people are compared remaining constant. The difference between a general concept and different specific conceptions (Rawls 1971, p. 21 f.) of equality may explain why some people claim ‘equality’ has no unified meaning – or is even devoid of meaning. (Rae 1981, p. 127 f., 132 f.)

For this reason, it helps to think of the idea of equality or inequality, in the context of social justice, not as a single principle, but as a complex group of principles forming the basic core of today’s egalitarianism. Different principles yield different answers. Both equality and inequality are complex and multifaceted concepts (Temkin 1993, chap. 2). In any real historical context, it is clear that no single notion of equality can sweep the field (Rae 1981, p. 132). Many egalitarians concede that much of our discussion of the concept is vague, but they believe there is also a common underlying strain of important moral concerns implicit in it (Williams 1973). Above all, it serves to remind us of our common humanity, despite various differences (cf. 2.3. below). In this sense, egalitarianism is often thought of as a single, coherent normative doctrine that embraces a variety of principles. Following the introduction of different principles and theories of equality, the discussion will return in the last section to the question how best to define egalitarianism and its core value.

2. Principles of Equality and Justice

Equality in its prescriptive usage is closely linked to morality and justice, and distributive justice in particular. Since antiquity equality has been considered a constitutive feature of justice. (On the history of the concept, cf. Albernethy 1959, Benn 1967, Brown 1988, Dann 1975, Thomson 1949.) People and movements throughout history have used the language of justice to contest inequalities. But what kind of role does equality play in a theory of justice? Philosophers have sought to clarify this by defending a variety of principles and conceptions of equality. This section introduces four such principles, ranging from the highly general and uncontroversial to the more specific and controversial. The next section reviews various conceptions of the ‘currency’ of equality. Different interpretations of the role of equality in a theory of justice emerge according to which of the four principles and metrics have been adopted. The first three principles of equality hold generally and primarily for all actions upon others and affecting others, and for their resulting circumstances. From the fourth principle onward, i.e., starting with the presumption of equality, the focus will be mainly on distributive justice and the evaluation of distribution.

When two persons have equal status in at least one normatively relevant respect, they must be treated equally with regard in this respect. This is the generally accepted formal equality principle that Aristotle articulated in reference to Plato: “treat like cases as like” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , V.3. 1131a10–b15; Politics , III.9.1280 a8–15, III. 12. 1282b18–23). The crucial question is which respects are normatively relevant and which are not. Some authors see this formal principle of equality as a specific application of a rule of rationality: it is irrational, because inconsistent, to treat equal cases unequally without sufficient reasons (Berlin 1955–56). But others claim that what is at stake here is a moral principle of justice, one reflecting the impartial and universalizable nature of moral judgments. On this view, the postulate of formal equality demands more than consistency with one’s subjective preferences: the equal or unequal treatment in question must be justifiable to the relevantly affected parties, and this on the sole basis of a situation’s objective features.

According to Aristotle, there are two kinds of equality, numerical and proportional (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , 1130b–1132b; cf. Plato, Laws , VI.757b–c). A way of treating others, or a distribution arising from it, is equal numerically when it treats all persons as indistinguishable, thus treating them identically or granting them the same quantity of a good per capita. That is not always just. In contrast, a way of treating others or a distribution is proportional or relatively equal when it treats all relevant persons in relation to their due. Just numerical equality is a special case of proportional equality. Numerical equality is only just under special circumstances, namely when persons are equal in the relevant respects so that the relevant proportions are equal. Proportional equality further specifies formal equality; it is the more precise and comprehensive formulation of formal equality. It indicates what produces an adequate equality.

Proportional equality in the treatment and distribution of goods to persons involves at least the following concepts or variables: Two or more persons \((P_1, P_2)\) and two or more allocations of goods to persons \((G)\) and \(X\) and \(Y\) as the quantity in which individuals have the relevant normative quality \(E\). This can be represented as an equation with fractions or as a ratio. If \(P1\) has \(E\) in the amount of \(X\) and if \(P_2\) has \(E\) in the amount \(Y\), then \(P_1\) is due \(G\) in the amount of \(X'\) and \(P_2\) is due \(G\) in the amount of \(Y'\), so that the ratio \(X/Y = X'/Y'\) is valid. (For the formula to be usable, the potentially large variety of factors involved have to be both quantifiable in principle and commensurable, i.e., capable of synthesis into an aggregate value.)

When factors speak for unequal treatment or distribution, because the persons are unequal in relevant respects, the treatment or distribution proportional to these factors is just. Unequal claims to treatment or distribution must be considered proportionally: that is the prerequisite for persons being considered equally.

This principle can also be incorporated into hierarchical, inegalitarian theories. It indicates that equal output is demanded with equal input. Aristocrats, perfectionists, and meritocrats all believe that persons should be assessed according to their differing deserts, understood in the broad sense of fulfillment of some relevant criterion. Reward and punishment, benefits and burdens, should be proportional to such deserts. Since this definition leaves open who is due what, there can be great inequality when it comes to presumed fundamental (natural) rights, deserts, and worth -– this is apparent in both Plato and Aristotle.

Aristotle’s idea of justice as proportional equality contains a fundamental insight. The idea offers a framework for a rational argument between egalitarian and non-egalitarian ideas of justice, its focal point being the question of the basis for an adequate equality (Hinsch 2003). Both sides accept justice as proportional equality. Aristotle’s analysis makes clear that the argument involves those features that decide whether two persons are to be considered equal or unequal in a distributive context.

On the formal level of pure conceptual explication, justice and equality are linked through these formal and proportional principles. Justice cannot be explained without these equality principles, which themselves only receive their normative significance in their role as principles of justice.

Formal and proportional equality is simply a conceptual schema. It needs to be made precise – i.e., its open variables need to be filled out. The formal postulate remains empty as long as it is unclear when, or through what features, two or more persons or cases should be considered equal. All debates over the proper conception of justice – over who is due what – can be understood as controversies over the question of which cases are equal and which unequal (Aristotle, Politics , 1282b 22). For this reason, equality theorists are correct in stressing that the claim that persons are owed equality becomes informative only when one is told what kind of equality they are owed (Nagel 1979; Rae 1981; Sen 1992, p. 13). Every normative theory implies a certain notion of equality. In order to outline their position, egalitarians must thus take account of a specific (egalitarian) conception of equality. To do so, they need to identify substantive principles of equality, which are discussed below.

Until the eighteenth century, it was assumed that human beings are unequal by nature. This postulate collapsed with the advent of the idea of natural right, which assumed a natural order in which all human beings were equal. Against Plato and Aristotle, the classical formula for justice according to which an action is just when it offers each individual his or her due took on a substantively egalitarian meaning in the course of time: everyone deserved the same dignity and respect. This is now the widely held conception of substantive, universal, moral equality. It developed among the Stoics, who emphasized the natural equality of all rational beings, and in early New Testament Christianity, which envisioned that all humans were equal before God, although this principle was not always adhered to in the later history of the church. This important idea was also taken up both in the Talmud and in Islam, where it was grounded in both Greek and Hebraic elements. In the modern period, starting in the seventeenth century, the dominant idea was of natural equality in the tradition of natural law and social contract theory. Hobbes (1651) postulated that in their natural condition, individuals possess equal rights, because over time they have the same capacity to do each other harm. Locke (1690) argued that all human beings have the same natural right to both (self-)ownership and freedom. Rousseau (1755) declared social inequality to be the result of a decline from the natural equality that characterized our harmonious state of nature, a decline catalyzed by the human urge for perfection, property and possessions (Dahrendorf 1962). For Rousseau (1755, 1762), the resulting inequality and rule of violence can only be overcome by binding individual subjectivity to a common civil existence and popular sovereignty. In Kant’s moral philosophy (1785), the categorical imperative formulates the equality postulate of universal human worth. His transcendental and philosophical reflections on autonomy and self-legislation lead to a recognition of the same freedom for all rational beings as the sole principle of human rights (Kant 1797, p. 230). Such Enlightenment ideas stimulated the great modern social movements and revolutions, and were taken up in modern constitutions and declarations of human rights. During the French Revolution, equality, along with freedom and fraternity, became a basis of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1789.

The principle that holds that human beings, despite their differences, are to be regarded as one another’s equals, is often also called ‘human equality’ or ‘basic equality’ or ‘equal worth’ or ‘human dignity’ (William 1962, Vlastos 1962, Kateb 2014, Waldron 2017, Rosen 2018). Whether these terms are synonyms is a matter of interpretation, but “they cluster together to form a powerful body of principle” (Waldron 2017, p. 3).

This fundamental idea of equal respect for all persons and of the equal worth or equal dignity of all human beings (Vlastos 1962) is widely accepted (Carter 2011, but see also Steinhoff 2015). In a period in which there is not agreement across the members of a complex society to any one metaphysical, religious, or traditional view (Habermas 1983, p. 53, 1992, pp. 39–44), it appears impossible to peacefully reach a general agreement on common political aims without accepting that persons must be treated as equals. As a result, moral equality constitutes the ‘egalitarian plateau’ for all contemporary political theories (Kymlicka 1990, p. 5).

Fundamental equality means that persons are alike in important relevant and specified respects alone, and not that they are all generally the same or can be treated in the same way (Nagel 1991). In a now commonly posed distinction, stemming from Dworkin (1977, p. 227), moral equality can be understood as prescribing treatment of persons as equals, i.e., with equal concern and respect, and not the often implausible principle of providing all persons with equal treatment. Recognizing that human beings are all equally individual does not mean treating them uniformly in any respects other than those in which they clearly have a moral claim to be treated alike.

Disputes arise, of course, concerning what these claims amount to and how they should be resolved. Philosophical debates are concerned with the kind of equal treatment normatively required when we mutually consider ourselves persons with equal dignity. The principle of moral equality is too abstract and needs to be made concrete if we are to arrive at a clear moral standard. Nevertheless, no conception of just equality can be deduced from the notion of moral equality. Rather, we find competing philosophical conceptions of equal treatment serving as interpretations of moral equality. These need to be assessed according to their degree of fidelity to the deeper ideal of moral equality (Kymlicka 1990, p. 44).

Many conceptions of equality operate along procedural lines involving a presumption of equality . More materially concrete, ethical approaches, as described in the next section below, are concerned with distributive criteria – the presumption of equality, in contrast, is a formal, procedural principle of construction located on a higher formal and argumentative level. What is at stake here is the question of the principle with which a material conception of justice should be constructed, particularly once the approaches described above prove inadequate. The presumption of equality is a prima facie principle of equal distribution for all goods politically suited for the process of public distribution. In the domain of political justice, all members of a given community, taken together as a collective body, have to decide centrally on the fair distribution of social goods, as well as on the distribution’s fair realization. Any claim to a particular distribution, including any existing distributive scheme, has to be impartially justified, i.e., no ownership should be recognized without justification. Applied to this political domain, the presumption of equality requires that everyone should get an equal share in the distribution unless certain types of differences are relevant and justify, through universally acceptable reasons, unequal shares. (With different terms and arguments, this principle is conceived as a presumption by Benn & Peters (1959, 111) and by Bedau (1967, 19); as a relevant reasons approach by Williams (1973); as a conception of symmetry by Tugendhat (1993, 374; 1997, chap. 3); as default option by Hinsch (2002, chap. 5); for criticism of the presumption of equality, cf. Westen (1990, chap. 10).) This presumption results in a principle of prima facie equal distribution for all distributable goods. A strict principle of equal distribution is not required, but it is morally necessary to justify impartially any unequal distribution. The burden of proof lies on the side of those who favor any form of unequal distribution. (For a justification of the presumption in favor of equality s. Gosepath 2004, II.8.; Gosepath 2015.)

The presumption of equality provides an elegant procedure for constructing a theory of distributive justice (Gosepath 2004). One has only to analyze what can justify unequal treatment or unequal distribution in different spheres. To put it briefly, the following postulates of equality are at present generally considered morally required.

Strict equality is called for in the legal sphere of civil freedoms, since – putting aside limitation on freedom as punishment – there is no justification for any exceptions. As follows from the principle of formal equality, all citizens must have equal general rights and duties, which are grounded in general laws that apply to all. This is the postulate of legal equality. In addition, the postulate of equal freedom is equally valid: every person should have the same freedom to structure his or her life, and this in the most far-reaching manner possible in a peaceful and appropriate social order.

In the political sphere, the possibilities for political participation should be equally distributed. All citizens have the same claim to participation in forming public opinion, and in the distribution, control, and exercise of political power. This is the postulate – requiring equal opportunity – of equal political power sharing. To ensure equal opportunity, social institutions have to be designed in such a way that persons who are disadvantaged, e.g. have a stutter or a low income, have an equal chance to make their views known and to participate fully in the democratic process.

In the social sphere, equally gifted and motivated citizens must have approximately the same chances to obtain offices and positions, independent of their economic or social class and native endowments. This is the postulate of fair equality of social opportunity. Any unequal outcome must nevertheless result from equality of opportunity, i.e., qualifications alone should be the determining factor, not social background or influences of milieu.

The equality required in the economic sphere is complex, taking account of several positions that – each according to the presumption of equality – justify a turn away from equality. A salient problem here is what constitutes justified exceptions to equal distribution of goods, the main subfield in the debate over adequate conceptions of distributive equality and its currency. The following factors are usually considered eligible for justified unequal treatment: (a) need or differing natural disadvantages (e.g. disabilities); (b) existing rights or claims (e.g. private property); (c) differences in the performance of special services (e.g. desert, efforts, or sacrifices); (d) efficiency; and (e) compensation for direct and indirect or structural discrimination (e.g. affirmative action).

These factors play an essential, albeit varied, role in the following alternative egalitarian theories of distributive justice. These offer different accounts of what should be equalized in the economic sphere. Most can be understood as applications of the presumption of equality (whether they explicitly acknowledge it or not); only a few (like strict equality, libertarianism, and sufficiency) are alternatives to the presumption.

3. Conceptions of Distributive Equality: Equality of What?

Every effort to interpret the concept of equality and to apply the principles of equality mentioned above demands a precise measure of the parameters of equality. We need to know the dimensions within which the striving for equality is morally relevant. What follows is a brief review of the seven most prominent conceptions of distributive equality, each offering a different answer to one question: in the field of distributive justice, what should be equalized, or what should be the parameter or “currency” of equality?

Simple equality, meaning everyone being furnished with the same material level of goods and services, represents a strict position as far as distributive justice is concerned. It is generally rejected as untenable.

Hence, with the possible exception of Babeuf (1796) and Shaw (1928), no prominent author or movement has demanded strict equality. Since egalitarianism has come to be widely associated with the demand for economic equality, and this in turn with communistic or socialistic ideas, it is important to stress that neither communism nor socialism – despite their protest against poverty and exploitation and their demand for social security for all citizens – calls for absolute economic equality. The orthodox Marxist view of economic equality was expounded in the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). Marx here rejects the idea of legal equality, on three grounds. First, he indicates, equality draws on a limited number of morally relevant perspectives and neglects others, thus having unequal effects. In Marx’s view, the economic structure is the most fundamental basis for the historical development of society, and is thus the point of reference for explaining its features. Second, theories of justice have concentrated excessively on distribution instead of the basic questions of production. Third, a future communist society needs no law and no justice, since social conflicts will have vanished.

As an idea, simple equality fails because of problems that are raised in regards to equality in general. It is useful to review these problems, as they require resolution in any plausible approach to equality.

(i) We need adequate indices for the measurement of the equality of the goods to be distributed. Through what concepts should equality and inequality be understood? It is thus clear that equality of material goods can lead to unequal satisfaction. Money constitutes a typical, though inadequate, index; at the very least, equal opportunity has to be conceived in other terms.

(ii) The time span needs to be indicated for realizing the desired model of equal distribution (McKerlie 1989, Sikora 1989). Should we seek to equalize the goods in question over complete individual lifetimes, or should we seek to ensure that various life segments are as equally provisioned as possible?

(iii) Equality distorts incentives promoting achievement in the economic field, and the administrative costs of redistribution produce wasteful inefficiencies (Okun 1975). Equality and efficiency need to be balanced. Often, Pareto-optimality is demanded in this respect, usually by economists. A social condition is Pareto-optimal or Pareto-efficient when it is not possible to shift to another condition judged better by at least one person and worse by none (Sen 1970, chap. 2, 2*). A widely discussed alternative to the Pareto principle is the Kaldor-Hicks welfare criterion. This stipulates that a rise in social welfare is always present when the benefits accruing through the distribution of value in a society exceed the corresponding costs. A change thus becomes desirable when the winners in such a change could compensate the losers for their losses, and still retain a substantial profit. In contrast to the Pareto-criterion, the Kaldor-Hicks criterion contains a compensation rule (Kaldor 1939). For purposes of economic analysis, such theoretical models of optimal efficiency make a great deal of sense. However, the analysis is always made relative to a starting situation that can itself be unjust and unequal. A society can thus be (close to) Pareto-optimality – i.e., no one can increase his or her material goods or freedoms without diminishing those of someone else – while also displaying enormous inequalities in the distribution of the same goods and freedoms. For this reason, egalitarians claim that it may be necessary to reduce Pareto-optimality for the sake of justice, if there is no more egalitarian distribution that is also Pareto-optimal. In the eyes of their critics, equality of whatever kind should not lead to some people having to make do with less, when this equalizing down does not benefit any of those who are in a worse position.

(iv) Moral objections : A strict and mechanical equal distribution between all individuals does not sufficiently take into account the differences among individuals and their situations. In essence, since individuals desire different things, why should everyone receive the same goods? Intuitively, for example, we can recognize that a sick person has other claims than a healthy person, and furnishing each with the same goods would be mistaken. With simple equality, personal freedoms are unacceptably limited and distinctive individual qualities insufficiently acknowledged; in this way they are in fact unequally regarded. Furthermore, persons not only have a moral right to their own needs being considered, but a right and a duty to take responsibility for their own decisions and the resulting consequences.

Working against the identification of distributive justice with simple equality, a basic postulate of many present-day egalitarians is as follows: human beings are themselves responsible for certain inequalities resulting from their free decisions; aside from minimum aid in emergencies, they deserve no recompense for such inequalities (but cf. relational egalatarians, discussed in Section 4 ). On the other hand, they are due compensation for inequalities that are not the result of self-chosen options. For egalitarians, the world is morally better when equality of life conditions prevail. This is an amorphous ideal demanding further clarification. Why is such equality an ideal, and what precise currency of equality does it involve?

By the same token, most egalitarians do not advocate an equality of outcome, but different kinds of equality of opportunity, due to their emphasis on a pair of morally central points: that individuals are responsible for their decisions, and that the only things to be considered objects of equality are those which serve the real interests of individuals. The opportunities to be equalized between people can be opportunities for well-being (i.e. objective welfare), or for preference satisfaction (i.e., subjective welfare), or for resources. It is not equality of objective or subjective well-being or resources themselves that should be equalized, but an equal opportunity to gain the well-being or resources one aspires to. Such equality depends on their being a realm of options for each individual equal to the options enjoyed by all other persons, in the sense of the same prospects for fulfillment of preferences or the possession of resources. The opportunity must consist of possibilities one can really take advantage of. Equal opportunity prevails when human beings effectively enjoy equal realms of possibility.

(v) Simple equality is very often associated with equality of results (although these are two distinct concepts). However, to strive only for equality of results is problematic. To illustrate the point, let us briefly limit the discussion to a single action and the event or state of affairs resulting from it. Arguably, actions should not be judged solely by the moral quality of their results, as important as this may be. One must also consider the way in which the events or circumstances to be evaluated have come about. Generally speaking, a moral judgement requires not only the assessment of the results of the action in question (the consequentialist aspect) but, first and foremost, the assessment of the intention of the actor (the deontological aspect). The source and its moral quality influence the moral judgement of the results (Pogge 1999, sect. V). For example, if you strike me, your blow will hurt me; the pain I feel may be considered bad in itself, but the moral status of your blow will also depend on whether you were (morally) allowed such a gesture (perhaps through parental status, although that is controversial) or even obliged to execute it (e.g. as a police officer preventing me from doing harm to others), or whether it was in fact prohibited but not prevented. What is true of individual actions (or their omission) has to be true mutatis mutandis of social institutions and circumstances like distributions resulting from collective social actions (or their omission). Social institutions should therefore be assessed not only on the basis of information about how they affect individual quality of life. A society in which people starve on the streets is certainly marked by inequality; nevertheless, its moral quality, i.e., whether the society is just or unjust with regard to this problem, also depends on the suffering’s causes. Does the society allow starvation as an unintended but tolerable side effect of what its members see as a just distributive scheme? Indeed, does it even defend the suffering as a necessary means, as with forms of Social Darwinism? Or has the society taken measures against starvation which have turned out to be insufficient? In the latter case, whether the society has taken such steps for reasons of political morality or efficiency again makes a moral difference. Hence even for egalitarians, equality of results is too narrow and one-sided a focus.

(vi) Finally, there is a danger of (strict) equality leading to uniformity, rather than to a respect for pluralism and democracy (Cohen 1989; Arneson 1993). In the contemporary debate, this complaint has been mainly articulated in feminist and multiculturalist theory. A central tenet of feminist theory is that gender has been and remains a historically variable and internally differentiated relation of domination. The same holds for so-called racial and ethnic differences, which are often still conceived of as marking different values. The different groups involved here rightly object to their discrimination, marginalization, and domination, and an appeal to equality of status thus seems a solution. However, as feminists and multiculturalists have pointed out, equality, as usually understood and practiced, is constituted in part by a denial and ranking of differences; as a result it seems less useful as an antidote to relations of domination. “Equality” can often mean the assimilation to a pre-existing and problematic ‘male’ or ‘white’ or ‘middle class’ norm. In short, domination and a fortiori inequality often arises out of an inability to appreciate and nurture differences, not out of a failure to see everyone as the same. To recognize these differences should however not lead to an essentialism grounded in sexual or cultural characteristics. There is a crucial debate between those who insist that sexual, racial, and ethnic differences should become irrelevant, on the one hand, and those believing that such differences, even though culturally relevant, should not furnish a basis for inequality: that one should rather find mechanisms for securing equality, despite valued differences. Neither of these strategies involves rejecting equality. The dispute is about how equality is to be attained (McKinnon 1989, Taylor 1992).

Proposing a connection between equality and pluralism, Michael Walzer’s theory (1983) aims at what he calls “complex equality”. According to Walzer, relevant reasons can only speak in favor of distributing specific types of goods in specific spheres, not in several or all spheres. Against a theory of simple equality promoting equal distribution of dominant goods, which underestimates the complexity of the criteria at work in each given sphere, the dominance of particular goods needs to be ended. For instance, purchasing power in the political sphere through means derived from the economic sphere (i.e., money) must be prevented. Walzer’s theory of complex equality is not actually aimed at equality per se, but at the separation of spheres of justice; the theory’s designation is misleading. Any theory of equality should, however, as per Walzer, avoid monistic conceptions and recognize instead the complexity of life and the plurality of criteria for justice.

The preceding considerations yield the following desideratum: instead of simple equality, a more complex equality needs to be conceptualized. That concept should resolve the problems discussed above through a distinction of various classes of goods, a separation of spheres, and a differentiation of relevant criteria.

Libertarianism and economic liberalism represent minimalist positions in relation to distributive justice. Citing Locke, they both postulate an original right to freedom and property, thus arguing against redistribution and social rights and for the free market (Nozick 1974; Hayek 1960). They assert an opposition between equality and freedom: the individual (natural) right to freedom can be limited only for the sake of foreign and domestic peace. For this reason, libertarians consider maintaining public order the state’s only legitimate duty. They assert a natural right to self-ownership (the philosophical term for “ownership of oneself” – i.e., one’s will, body, work, etc.) that entitles everybody to hitherto unowned bits of the external world by means of mixing their labor with it. All individuals can thus claim property if “enough and as good” is left over for others (Locke’s proviso). Correspondingly, they defend market freedoms and oppose the use of redistributive taxation schemes for the sake of egalitarian social justice. A principal objection to libertarian theory is that its interpretation of the Lockean proviso – nobody’s situation should be worsened through an initial acquisition of property – leads to an excessively weak requirement and is thus unacceptable (Kymlicka 1990, pp.108–117). However, with a broader and more adequate interpretation of what it means for one a situation to be worse than another, it is much more difficult to justify private appropriation and, a fortiori , all further ownership rights. If the proviso recognizes the full range of interests and alternatives that self-owners have, then it will not generate unrestricted rights over unequal amounts of resources. Another objection is that precisely if one’s own free accomplishment is what is meant to count, as the libertarians argue, success should not depend strictly on luck, extraordinary natural gifts, inherited property, and status. In other words, equal opportunity also needs to at least be present as a counterbalance, ensuring that the fate of human beings is determined by their decisions and not by unavoidable social circumstances. Equal opportunity thus seems to be the frequently vague minimal formula at work in every egalitarian conception of distributive justice. Many egalitarians, however, wish for more – namely, an equality of (at least basic) life conditions .

In any event, with a shift away from a strictly negative idea of freedom, economic liberalism can indeed itself point the way to more social and economic equality. For with such a shift, what is at stake is not only assuring an equal right to self-defense, but also furnishing everyone more or less the same chance to actually make use of the right to freedom (e.g. Van Parijs 1995, Steiner 1994, Otsuka 2005). In other words, certain basic goods need to be furnished to assure the equitable or “fair value of the basic liberties” (Rawls 1993, pp. 356–63).

It is possible to interpret utilitarianism as concretizing moral equality – and this in a way meant to offer the same consideration to the interests of all human beings (Kymlicka 1990, pp. 31f., Hare 1981, p. 26, Sen 1992, pp. 13f.). From the utilitarian perspective, since everyone counts as one and no one as more than one (Bentham), the interests of all should be treated equally without consideration of contents of interest or an individual’s material situation. For utilitarianism, this means that all enlightened personal interests have to be fairly aggregated. The morally proper action is the one that maximizes utility (Hare 1984). This conception of equal treatment has been criticized as inadequate by many opponents of utilitarianism. At least in utilitarianism’s classical form – so the critique reads – the hoped for moral equality is flawed, because all desires are taken up by the utilitarian calculation, including “selfish” and “external” preferences (Dworkin 1977, p. 234) that are meant to all have equal weight, even when they diminish the ‘rights’ and intentions of others. This conflicts with our everyday understanding of equal treatment. What is here at play is an argument involving “offensive” and “expensive” taste: a person cannot expect others to sustain his or her desires at the expense of their own (Kymlicka 1990, p. 40 f.). Rather, according to generally shared conviction, equal treatment consistently requires a basis of equal rights and resources that cannot be taken away from one person, whatever the desire of others. In line with Rawls (1971, pp. 31, 564, cf. 450), many hold that justice entails according no value to interests insofar as they conflict with justice. According to this view, unjustified preferences will not distort the mutual claims people have on each other. Equal treatment has to consist of everyone being able to claim a fair portion, and not in all interests having the same weight in disposal over my portion. Utilitarians cannot admit any restrictions on interests based on morals or justice. As long as utilitarian theory lacks a concept of justice and fair allocation, it must fail in its goal of treating everyone as equals. As Rawls (1971, pp. 27) also famously argues, utilitarianism that involves neglecting the separateness of persons does not contain a proper interpretation of moral equality as equal respect for each individual.

The concept of welfare equality is motivated by an intuition that when it comes to political ethics, what is at stake is individual well-being. The central criterion for justice must consequently be equalizing the level of welfare. But taking welfare as what is to be equalized leads to difficulties resembling those of utilitarianism. If one contentiously identifies subjective welfare with preference satisfaction, it seems implausible to count all individual preferences as equal, some – such as the desire to do others wrong – being inadmissible on grounds of justice (the offensive taste argument). Any welfare-centered concept of equality grants people with refined and expensive taste more resources – something distinctly at odds with our moral intuitions (the expensive taste argument) (Dworkin 1981a). However, satisfaction in the fulfillment of desires cannot serve as a standard, since we wish for more than a simple feeling of happiness. A more viable standard for welfare comparisons would seem to be success in the fulfillment of preferences. A fair evaluation of such success cannot be purely subjective, but requires a standard of what should or could have been achieved. This itself involves an assumption regarding just distribution, so it cannot stand as an independent criterion for justice. Another serious problem with any welfare-centered concept of equality is that it cannot take account of either desert (Feinberg 1970) or personal responsibility for one’s own well-being, to the extent this is possible and reasonable.

Represented above all by both Rawls and Dworkin, resource equality avoids such problems (Rawls 1971; Dworkin 1981b). It holds individuals responsible for their decisions and actions, but not for circumstances beyond their control, such as race, sex, skin-color, intelligence, and social position, thus excluding these as distributive criteria. Equal opportunity is insufficient because it does not compensate for unequal innate gifts. What applies for social circumstances should also apply for such gifts, as both are purely arbitrary from a moral point of view.

According to Rawls, human beings should have the same initial expectations of “basic goods,” i.e., all-purpose goods; this in no way precludes ending up with different quantities of such goods or resources, as a result of personal economic decisions and actions. When prime importance is accorded an assurance of equal basic freedoms and rights, inequalities are just when they fulfill two provisos: on the one hand, they have to be linked to offices and positions open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; on the other hand, they have to reflect the famous ‘difference principle’ in offering the greatest possible advantage to the least advantaged members of society (Rawls 1993, p. 5 f.; 1971, § 13). Otherwise, the economic order requires revision. Due to the argument of the moral arbitrariness of talents, the commonly accepted criteria for merit (like productivity, working hours, effort) are clearly relativized. The difference principle only allows the talented to earn more to the extent this raises the lowest incomes. According to Rawls, with regard to the basic structure of society, the difference principle should be opted for under a self-chosen “veil of ignorance” regarding personal and historical circumstances and similar factors: the principle offers a general assurance of not totally succumbing to the hazards of a free market situation; and everyone does better than with inevitably inefficient total equal distribution, whose level of well-being is below that of those worst off under the difference principle.

Since Rawls’ Theory of Justice is the classical focal point of present-day political philosophy, it is worth noting the different ways his theory claims to be egalitarian. First, Rawls upholds a natural basis for equal human worth: a minimal capacity for having a conception of the good and a sense of justice. Second, through the device of the “veil of ignorance,” people are conceived as equals in the “original position.” Third, the idea of sharing this “original position” presupposes the parties having political equality, as equal participants in the process of choosing the principles by which they would be governed. Fourth, Rawls proposes fair equality of opportunity. Fifth, he maintains that all desert must be institutionally defined, depending on the goals of the society. No one deserves his or her talents or circumstances, which are products of the natural lottery. Finally, the difference principle tends toward equalizing holdings. However, it is important to keep in mind, as Scheffler (2003) has pointed out, that the main focus of Rawls’ theory is justice as such; it is only secondarily about an egalitarian conception of justice. In addition, since the primary subject is the basic structure, pure procedural justice has priority over distributive or allocative justice Equality is not the only or single value for Rawls.

Dworkin’s equality of resources (1981b), on the other hand, is concerned with equality as such. His theory stakes a claim to being even more ‘ambition- and endowment-insensitive’ than Rawls’ theory. Unequal distribution of resources is considered fair only when it results from the decisions and intentional actions of those concerned. Dworkin proposes a hypothetical auction in which everyone can accumulate bundles of resources through equal means of payment, so that in the end no one is jealous of another’s bundle (the envy test). The auction-procedure also offers a way to precisely measure equality of resources: the measure of resources devoted to a person’s life is defined by the importance of the resources to others (Dworkin 1981b, p. 290). In the free market, how the distribution then develops depends on an individual’s ambitions. The inequalities that thus emerge are justified, since one has to take responsibility for how one’s choices turn out (i.e., one’s “option luck”) in the realm of personal responsibility. In contrast, unjustified inequalities based on different innate provisions and gifts, as well as on brute luck, should be compensated for through a fictive differentiated insurance system: its premiums are established behind Dworkin’s own “veil of ignorance,” in order to then be distributed in real life to everyone and collected in taxes. For Dworkin, this is the key to the natural lottery being balanced fairly, preventing a “slavery of the talented” through excessive redistribution.

Only some egalitarians hold inequality to be bad per se. Most of today’s egalitarians are pluralistic, recognizing other values besides equality. So called luck-egalitarians regard the moral significance of choice and responsibility as one of the most important values besides equality (for an overview over the debate see Lippert-Rasmussen 2015). They hold that it is bad – unjust or unfair – for some to be worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own (Temkin 1993, 13) and therefore strive to eliminate involuntary disadvantages, for which the sufferer cannot be held responsible (Cohen 1989, 916).

The principle of responsibility provides a central normative vantage point for deciding on which grounds one might justify which inequality. The positive formulation of the responsibility principle requires an assumption of personal responsibility and holds that inequalities which are the result of self-chosen options are just. (See above all Dworkin, 1981b, p. 311; contra: Anderson, 1999.) Unequal portions of social goods are thus fair when they result from the decisions and intentional actions of those concerned. Individuals must accept responsibility for the costs of their decisions. Persons are themselves responsible for certain inequalities that result from their voluntary decisions, and they deserve no compensation for such inequalities, aside from minimal provisions in cases of dire need (see below). In its negative formulation , the responsibility principle holds that inequalities which are not the result of self-chosen options are to be rejected as unjust; persons disadvantaged in this way deserve compensation. That which one can do nothing about, or for which one is not responsible, cannot constitute a relevant criterion. Still, the initial assumption remains an ascription of responsibility, and each individual case requires close scrutiny: one is responsible and accountable unless there is an adequate reason for being considered otherwise (but cf. Stemplowska 2013 for a different interpretation)..

If advantages or disadvantages that are due to arbitrary and unearned differences are unfair, this holds for social circumstances as well as natural endowments. The reasons favoring an exclusion of features like skin-color, size, sex, and place of origin as primarily discriminative apply equally to other natural human qualities, like intelligence, appearance, physical strength, and so forth. The kind and the extent of one’s natural abilities are due to a lottery of nature; considered from a moral standpoint, their distribution is purely arbitrary (Rawls, 1971, § 48). To sum up: natural and social endowment must not count, and personal intentions and voluntary decisions should count. Thus, a given social order is just when it equalizes as much as possible, and in a normatively tenable way, all personal disadvantages for which an individual is not responsible, and accords individuals the capacity to bear the consequences of their decisions and actions, as befits their capacity for autonomy.

Objections to all versions of “brute-luck egalitarianism” come from two sides. Some authors criticize its in their view unjustified or excessively radical rejection of merit: The luck-egalitarian thesis of desert only being justifiably acknowledged if it involves desert “all the way down” (Nozick 1974, p. 225) not only destroys the classical, everyday principle of desert, since everything has a basis that we ourselves have not created. In the eyes of such critics, along with the merit-principle this argument also destroys our personal identity, since we can no longer accredit ourselves with our own capacities and accomplishments. (Cf. the texts in Pojman & McLeod 1998, Olsaretti 2003.) Other authors consider the criterion for responsibility to be too strong, indeed inhuman (or “harsh”) in its consequences, since human beings responsible for their own misery would (supposedly) be left alone with their misery (Anderson 1999, also MacLeod 1998, Scheffler 2003, Wolff 1998, Fleurbaey 1995, Voigt 2007, Eyal 2017, Olsaretti 2009, Stemplowska 2009). However, pluralistic egalitarians should be able to argue that there are special cases, in which people are so badly off that they should be helped, even if they got into the miserable situation through their own fault. But even when people are in terrible situations, which did not arise through their own fault (‘bad brute luck’) – for instance, when they are disabled from birth – and egalitarians therefore have reasons to help them, these reasons are supposedly stigmatizing, since in these cases the principles of distribution would be based on pity. In these cases, political institutions have to take certain decisions – for example, in which category a particular case of distress should be placed – and gather relevant information on their citizens. Against such a procedure, one could object that it subjects the citizens to the tutelage of the state and harms their private sphere (Anderson 1999, also Hayek 1960: 85–102).

Approaches based on equality of opportunity can be read as revisions of both welfarism and resourcism. Ranged against welfarism and designed to avoid its pitfalls, they incorporate the powerful ideas of choice and responsibility into various, improved forms of egalitarianism. Such approaches are meant to equalize outcomes resulting from causes beyond a person’s control (i.e., beyond circumstances or endowment), but to allow differential outcomes that result from autonomous choice or ambition. But the approaches are also aimed at maintaining the insight that individual preferences have to count, as the sole basis for a necessary linkage back to the individual perspective: otherwise, there is an overlooking of the person’s value. In Arneson’s (1989, 1990) concept of equal opportunity for welfare , the preferences determining the measure of individual well-being are meant to be conceived hypothetically – i.e., a person would decide on them after a process of ideal reflection. In order to correspond to the morally central vantage of personal responsibility, what should be equalized are not enlightened preferences themselves, but rather real opportunities to achieve or receive a good, to the extent that it is aspired to. G.A. Cohen’s (1989, p. 916 f.) broader conception of equality of access to advantage attempts to integrate the perspectives of welfare equality and resource equality through the overriding concept of advantage. For Cohen, there are two grounds for egalitarian compensation. Egalitarians will be moved to furnish a paralyzed person with a compensatory wheelchair independently of the person’s welfare level. This egalitarian response to disability overrides equality of (opportunity to) welfare. Egalitarians also favor compensation for phenomena such as pain, independent of any loss of capacity – for instance by paying for expensive medicine. But, Cohen claims, any justification for such compensation has to invoke the idea of equality of opportunity to welfare. He thus views both aspects, resources and welfare, as necessary and irreducible. Much of Roemer’s (1998) more technical argument is devoted to constructing the scale to calibrate the extent to which something is the result of circumstances. An incurred adverse consequence is the result of circumstances, not choice, precisely to the extent that it is a consequence that persons of one or another specific type can be expected to incur.

Theories that limit themselves to the equal distribution of basic means, in the hope of doing justice to the different goals of all human beings, are often criticized as fetishistic, because they focus on means as opposed to what individuals gain with these means (Sen 1980). The value that goods have for someone depends on objective possibilities, the natural environment, and individual capacities. Hence, in contrast to the resourcist approach, Amartya Sen proposes orientating distribution around “capabilities to achieve functionings,” i.e., the various things that a person manages to do orbe in leading a life (Sen 1992). In other words, evaluating individual well-being has to be tied to a capability for achieving and maintaining various precious conditions and “functionings” constitutive of a person’s being, such as adequate nourishment, good health, the ability to move about freely or to appear in public without shame. The real freedom to acquire well-being is also important here, a freedom represented in the capability to oneself choose forms of achievement and the combination of “functionings.” For Sen, capabilities are thus the measure of an equality of capabilities human beings enjoy to lead their lives. A problem consistently raised with capability approaches is the ability to weigh capabilities in order to arrive at a metric for equality. The problem is intensified by the fact that various moral perspectives are blended in the concept of capability (Cohen 1993, p. 17–26, Williams 1987). Martha Nussbaum (1992, 2000) has linked the capability approach to an Aristotelian, essentialistic, “thick” theory of the good – a theory meant to be, as she puts it, “vague,” incomplete, and open-ended enough to leave place for individual and cultural variation. On the basis of such a “thick” conception of necessary and universal elements of a good life, certain capabilities and functionings can be designated as foundational. In this manner, Nussbaum can endow the capability approach with a precision that furnishes an index of interpersonal comparison, but at the risk of not being neutral enough regarding the plurality of personal conceptions of the good, a neutrality normally required by most liberals (most importantly Rawls 1993; but see Robeyns 2009 for a different take on the comparison with Rawls). For further discussion, see the entry on the capability approach .

Since the late 1990s, social relations egalitarianism has appeared in philosophical discourse as an increasingly important competitor to distribuitivist accounts of justice, especially its luck egalitarian versions (cf. Lippert-Rassmussen 2018). Proponents of social relations egalitarianism include Anderson (1999), Miller (1997), Scanlon (1996, 2018), Scheffler (2003, 2005, 2015), Wolff (1998, 2010) and Young (1990). Negatively, they are united in a rejection of the view that justice is a matter of eliminating differential luck. Positively, they claim that society is just if, and only if, individuals within it relate to one another as equals. Accordingly, the site of justice (i.e. that to which principles of justice apply) is society, not distributions. Relational Egalitarianism has a certain overlap with many theories of recognition and non-domination. Certain status differences are at the core of their objections, like those stigmatizing differences in status, whereby the badly off are caused to experience themselves as inferior, and are treated as inferiors, or when inequalities create objectionable relations of power(Honneth/Fraser 2003) and domination (Pettit 2001).

What does it mean that (and when do) individuals within a society relate to one another as equals? Racial discrimination, for example, is a paradigmatic instance of this condition?s violation. But once we move beyond a handful of such examples things become much less clear.

These claims to social and political equality exclude all unequal, hierarchical forms of social relationships, in which some people dominate, exploit, marginalize, demean, and inflict violence upon others:

As a social ideal, it holds that a human society must be conceived of as a cooperative arrangement among equals, each of whom enjoys the same social standing. As a political ideal, it highlights the claims that citizens are entitled to make on one another by virtue of their status as citizens, without any need for a moralized accounting of the details of their particular circumstances. (Scheffler 2003, p. 22)

However, forms of differentiation that do not violate moral equality (see above) are not per se excluded from social equality, if they are compatible with the recognition of the equal social status of concerned parties, as with differences relating to merit, need, and, if appropriate, race, gender, and social background (as in cases of affirmative action or fair punishment).

Where there is social equality, people feel that each member of the community enjoys an equal standing with all the rest that overrides their unequal ratings along particular dimensions. (Miller, 1997, p. 232)

Thus the question has to be answered whether – and if so, why – other dimensions, such as a person’s natural talents, creativity, intelligence, innovative skills or entrepreneurial ability, can be the basis for legitimate inequalities.

Relational egalitarians need a certain conception of what an equal standing in society amounts to and implies in terms of rights and goods. One way to offer such an account would be to rely (like Anderson 1999) on the capabilities approach (§3.8) and sufficitarianism (§6.2.): In a democratic community that preserves the free and equal status of persons, at least three sets of conditions have to be fulfilled.

First, certain political conditions are necessary to allow citizens to participate as equals in democratic deliberation. These include, among others, the capabilities to vote, hold office, assemble, petition the government, speak freely, and move about freely (Rawls 1999, p.53). The principle of democratic equality (as asked for by Anderson 1999) requires us to eliminate social hierarchies that prevent a democratically organized society, a society in which we cooperate and decide upon state action as equals. Persons morally owe each other the capabilities and conditions to live as equals in a democratic community (Christiano 2008, Kolodny 2014). Democracy can be interpreted as realizing public equality in collective decision-making.

Second, to participate as an equal in civil society, certain civil conditions must obtain. These include the conditions that make it robustly likely that injustices such as marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism (Anderson 1999 with reference to Young 1990), or domination (Pettit 2001) can be to avoided. Third, certain social conditions and personal capabilities have to obtain that enable people to enjoy equal standing in society. Citizens need, in this regard, adequate nutrition, shelter, clothing, education, and medical care. This last point leads into the debate over whether a relational egalitarian conception of social justice yields intrinsic and instrumental reasons of justice to care about distributive inequality in socially produced goods, despite its emphasis on just social relationships and not the distribution of goods per se (Schemmel 2011, Elford 2017).

Justice is primarily related to individual actions. Individual persons are the primary bearers of responsibility (the key principle of ethical individualism). This raises two controversial issues in the contemporary debate.

One could regard the norms of distributive equality as applying to groups rather than individuals. It is often groups that rightfully raise the issue of an inequality between themselves and the rest of society, as with women and racial and ethnic groups. The question arises of whether inequality among such groups should be considered morally objectionable in itself, or whether even in the case of groups, the underlying concern should be how individuals (as members of such groups) fare in comparative terms. If there is a worry about inequalities between groups of individuals, why does this not translate into a worry about inequalities between members of the group?

A further question concerns whether the norms of distributive equality (whatever they are) apply to all individuals, regardless of where (and when) they live. Or rather, do they only hold for members of communities within states and nations? Most theories of equality deal exclusively with distributive equality among people in a single society. There does not, however, seem to be any rationale for that limitation. Can the group of the entitled be restricted prior to the examination of concrete claims? Many theories seem to imply this, especially when they connect distributive justice or the goods to be distributed with social cooperation or production. For those who contribute nothing to cooperation, such as the disabled, children, or future generations, would have to be denied a claim to a fair share. The circle of persons who are to be the recipients of distribution would thus be restricted from the outset. Other theories are less restrictive, insofar as they do not link distribution to actual social collaboration, yet nonetheless do restrict it, insofar as they bind it to the status of citizenship. In this view, distributive justice is limited to the individuals within a society. Those outside the community have no entitlement to social justice. Unequal distribution among states and the social situations of people outside the particular society could not, in this view, be a problem of social distributive justice (Nagel 2005). Yet here too, the universal morality of equal respect and the principle of equal distribution demand that all persons consider one another as prima facie equally entitled to the goods, unless reasons for an unequal distribution can be advanced. It may be that in the process of justification, reasons will emerge for privileging those who were particularly involved in the production of a good, but there is no prima facie reason to exclude from the outset other persons, such as those from other countries, from the process of distribution and justification (Pogge 2002). That may seem most intuitively plausible in the case of natural resources (e.g. oil) that someone discovers by chance on or beneath the surface of his or her property. Why should such resources belong to the person who discovers them, or on whose property they are located? Nevertheless, in the eyes of many if not most people, global justice, i.e., extending egalitarian distributive justice globally, demands too much from individuals and their states (Miller 1998; but cf. Caney 2005). Alternatively, one might argue that there are other ‘special relations’ between members of one society that do not exist between members of different societies. Nationalism is an example for such a (controversial) thesis that may provide a case for a kind of local equality (Miller 1995). For further discussion, see the entry on global justice.

Another issue is the relationship between generations. Does the present generation have an egalitarian obligation towards future generations regarding equal living conditions? One argument in favor of this conclusion might be that people should not end up unequally well off as a result of morally arbitrary factors. However, the issue of justice between generation is notoriously complex (Temkin 1992). For further discussion, see the entry on intergenerational justice .

6. The Value of Equality: Why Equality?

Does equality play a major role in a theory of justice, and if so, what is this role? A conception of justice is egalitarian when it views equality as a fundamental goal of justice. Temkin has put it as follows:

… an egalitarian is any person who attaches some value to equality itself (that is, any person that cares at all about equality, over and above the extent it promotes other ideals). So, equality needn’t be the only value, or even the ideal she values most… . Egalitarians have the deep and (for them) compelling view that it is a bad thing – unjust and unfair – for some to be worse off than others through no fault of their own. (Temkin 1986, p. 100, cf. 1993, p. 7)

In general, the focus of the modern egalitarian effort to realize equality is on the possibility of a good life, i.e., on an equality of life prospects and life circumstances – interpreted in various ways according to various positions in the “equality of what” debate (see above).

It is apparent that there are three sorts of egalitarianism: intrinsic, instrumental and constitutive. (For a twofold distinction cf. Parfit 1997, Temkin 1993, p. 11, McKerlie, 1996, p. 275.)

Intrinsic egalitarians view equality as a good in itself. As pure egalitarians, they are concerned solely with equality, most of them with equality of social circumstances, according to which it is intrinsically bad if some people are worse off than others through no fault of their own. But it is in fact the case that people do not always consider inequality a moral evil. Intrinsic egalitarians regarde quality as desirable even when the equalization would be of no use to any of the affected parties, such as when equality can only be produced through depressing the level of well being of everyone’s life. But something can only have an intrinsic value when it is good for at least one person, when it makes one life better in some way or another.

The following “ leveling-down ” objection indicates that doing away within equality in fact ought to produce better circumstances; it is otherwise unclear why equality should be desired. (For such an objection, cf. Nozick 1974, p. 229, Raz 1986, chap. 9, p. 227, 235, Temkin 1993, pp. 247–8.) Sometimes inequality can only be ended by depriving those who are better off of their resources, rendering them as poorly off as everyone else. (For anyone looking for a drastic literary example, Kurt Vonnegut’s 1950 science-fiction story Harrison Bergeron is recommended.) This would have to be an acceptable approach according to the intrinsic conception. But would it be morally good if, in a group consisting of both blind and sighted persons, those with sight were rendered blind because the blind could not be offered sight? That would be morally perverse. Doing away with inequality by bringing everyone down contains – so the objection goes – nothing good. Such leveling-down objections would of course only be valid if there were indeed no better and equally egalitarian alternatives available, but there are nearly always such alternatives: e.g. those who can see should have to help the blind, financially or otherwise. When there are no alternatives, in order to avoid such objections, intrinsic egalitarianism cannot be strict, but needs to be pluralistic . Then intrinsic egalitarians could say there is something good about the change, namely greater equality, although they would concede that much is bad about it. Pluralistic egalitarians do not have equality as their only goal; they also admit other values and principles, above all the principle of welfare, according to which it is better when people are doing better. In addition, pluralistic egalitarianism should be moderate enough to not always grant equality victory in the case of conflict between equality and welfare. Instead, they must accept reductions in equality for the sake of a higher quality of life for all (as with Rawls’ difference principle).

At present, many egalitarians are ready to concede that equality in the sense of equality of life circumstances has no compelling value in itself, but that, in a framework of liberal concepts of justice, its meaning emerges in pursuit of other ideals, like universal freedom, the full development of human capacities and the human personality, the mitigation of suffering and defeat of domination and stigmatization, the stable coherence of modern and freely constituted societies, and so forth (Scanlon 1996, 2018). For those who are worse off, unequal circumstances often mean considerable (relative) disadvantages and many (absolute) evils; as a rule, these (relative) disadvantages and (absolute) evils are the source of our moral condemnation of unequal circumstances. But this does not mean that inequality as such is an evil. Hence, the argument goes, fundamental moral ideals other than equality stand behind our aspiring for equality. To reject inequality on such grounds is to favor equality either as a byproduct or as a means, and not as a goal or intrinsic value. In its treatment of equality as a derived virtue, the sort of egalitarianism – if the term is actually suitable – here at play is instrumental .

As indicated, there is also a third, more suitable approach to the equality ideal: a constitutive egalitarianism. According to this approach, to the aspiration to equality is rooted in other moral grounds, namely because certain inequalities are unjust. Equality has value, but this is an extrinsic value, since it derives from another, higher moral principle of equal dignity and respect. But it is not instrumental for this reason, i.e., it is not only valued on account of moral equality, but also on its own account. (For the distinction between the origin of a value and the kind of value it is, cf. Korsgaard 1996.) Equality stands in relation to justice as does a part to a whole. The requirement of justification is based on moral equality, and in certain contexts, successful justification leads to the above-named principles of equality, i.e., formal, proportional equality and the presumption of equality. Thus, according to constitutive egalitarianism, these principles and the resulting equality are required by justice, and by the same token constitute social justice.

It is important to further distinguish two levels of egalitarianism and non-egalitarianism, respectively. On a first level, a constitutive egalitarian presumes that every explication of the moral standpoint is incomplete without terms such as ‘equal,’ ‘similarly,’ etc. In contrast, a non-egalitarianism operating on the same level considers such terms misplaced or redundant. On a second level, when it comes to concretizing and specifying conceptions of justice, a constitutive egalitarian gives equality substantive weight. On this level, more and less egalitarian positions can be found, according to the chosen currency of equality (the criteria by which just equality is measured) and according to the reasons for unequal distributions (exemptions of the presumption of equality) that the respective theories regard as well grounded. Egalitarianism on the second level thus relates to the kind, quality and quantity of things to be equalized. Because of such variables, a clear-cut definition of second level egalitarianism cannot be formulated. In contrast, non-egalitarians on this second level advocate a non-relational entitlement theory of justice.

Alongside the often-raised objections against equality mentioned in the section on “simple equality” (3.1. above) there is a different and more fundamental critique formulated by first level non-egalitarians: that equality does not have a foundational role in the grounding of claims to justice. While the older version of a critique of egalitarianism comes mainly from the conservative end of the political spectrum, thus arguing in general against “patterned principles of justice” (Nozick 1974, esp. pp. 156–157), the critique’s newer version also often can be heard in progressive circles (Walzer 1983, Raz 1986, chap. 9, Frankfurt 1987, 1997, Parfit 1997, Anderson 1999). This first-level critique of equality poses the basic question of why justice should in fact be conceived relationally and (what is here the same) comparatively. Referring back to Joel Feinberg’s (1974) distinction between comparative and non-comparative justice, non-egalitarians object to the moral requirement to treat people as equals, and the many demands for justice emerging from it. They argue that neither the postulate nor these demands involve comparative principles, let alone any equality principles. They reproach first-level egalitarians for a confusion between “equality” and “universals.” As the non-egalitarians see things, within many principles of justice – at least the especially important ones – the equality-terminology is redundant. Equality is thus merely a byproduct of the general fulfillment of actually non-comparative standards of justice: something obscured through the unnecessary insertion of an expression of equality (Raz 1986, p. 227f.). At least the central standards of dignified human life are not relational but “absolute.” As Harry Frankfurt puts it: “It is whether people have good lives, and not how their lives compare with the lives of others” (Frankfurt 1997, p. 6). And again: “The fundamental error of egalitarianism lies in supposing that it is morally important whether one person has less than another regardless of how much either of them has” (Frankfurt 1987, p. 34).

From the non-egalitarian perspective, what is really at stake in helping those worse off and improving their lot is humanitarian concern , a desire to alleviate suffering. Such concern is not understood as egalitarian, as it is not focused on the difference between the better off and the worse off as such (whatever the applied standard), but on improving the situation of the latter. Their distress constitutes the actual moral foundation. The wealth of those better off only furnishes a means that has to be transferred for the sake of mitigating the distress, as long as other, morally negative consequences do not emerge in the process. The strength of the impetus for more equality lies in the urgency of the claims of those worse off, not in the extent of the inequality. For this reason, instead of equality the non-egalitarian critics favor one or another entitlement theory of justice , such as Nozick’s (1974) libertarianism (cf. 3.2. above) and Frankfurt’s (1987) doctrine of sufficiency , according to which “What is important from the moral point of view is not that everyone should have the same but that each should have enough. If everyone had enough , it would be of no moral consequence whether some had more than others” (Frankfurt 1987, p. 21).

Parfit’s (1997) priority view accordingly calls for a focus on improving the situation of society’s weaker and poorer members, and indeed all the more urgently the worse off they are, even if they can be less helped than others in the process. Parfit (1995) distinguishes between egalitarianism and prioritarianism. According to prioritarians, benefiting people is more important the worse off those people are. This prioritising will often increase equality, but they are two distinct values, since in an important respect equality is a relational value while priority is not. However, egalitarians and prioritarians share an important feature, in that both hold that the best possible distribution of a fixed sum of goods is an equal one. It is thus a matter of debate whether prioritarianism is a sort of egalitarianism or a (decent) inegalitarianism. In any case, entitlement-based non-egalitarian arguments can practically result in an equality of outcome as far-reaching as egalitarian theories. Hence the fulfillment of an absolute or non-comparative standard for everyone (e.g. to the effect that nobody should starve) frequently results in a certain equality of outcome, where such a standard comprises not only a decent but a good life. Consequently, the debate here centers on the basis – is it equality or something else? – and not so much on the outcome – are persons or groups more or less equal, according to a chosen metric? Possibly, the difference lies even deeper, in their respective conceptions of morality in general.

Egalitarians can respond to the anti-egalitarian critique by conceding that it is the nature of some (however certainly far from all) essential norms of morality and justice to be concerned primarily with the adequate fulfillment of the separate claims of individuals. However, whether a claim can itself be considered suitable can be ascertained only by asking whether it can be agreed on by all those affected in hypothetical conditions of freedom and equality. (See, e.g., Casal 2007 for a deeper discussion and critique of the doctrine of sufficiency.) This justificatory procedure is more necessary if it is less evident that what is at stake is actually suffering, distress, or an objective need. In the view of the constitutive egalitarians, all the judgments of distributive justice should be approached relationally, by asking which distributive scheme all concerned parties can universally and reciprocally agree to. As described at some length in the pertinent section above, many egalitarians argue that a presumption in favor of equality follows from this justification requirement. In the eyes of such egalitarians, this is all one needs for the justification and determination of the constitutive value of equality.

Secondly, even if – for the sake of argument – the question is left open as to whether demands for distribution according to objective needs (e.g. alleviating hunger) involve non-comparative entitlement-claims, it is nonetheless always necessary to resolve the question of what needy individuals are owed. And this is tied in a basic way to the question of what persons owe one another in comparable or worse situations, and how scarce resources (money, goods, time, energy) must be invested in light of the sum total of our obligations. While the claim on our aid may well appear non-relational, determining the kind and extent of the aid must always be relational, at least in circumstances of scarcity (and resources are always scarce). Claims are either “satiable” (Raz 1986, p. 235) – i.e., an upper limit or sufficiency level can be indicated, after which each person’s claim to X has been fulfilled – or they are not. For insatiable claims, to stipulate any level at which one is or ought to be sufficiently satisfied is arbitrary. If the standards of sufficiency are defined as a bare minimum, why should persons be content with that minimum? Why should the manner in which welfare and resources are distributed above the poverty level not also be a question of justice? If, by contrast, we are concerned solely with claims that are in principle “satiable,” such claims having a reasonable definition of sufficiency, then these standards of sufficiency will most likely be very high. In Frankfurt’s definition, for example, sufficiency is reached only when persons are satisfied and no longer actively strive for more. Since people find themselves ourselves operating, in practice, in circumstances far beneath such a high sufficiency level, they (of course) live under conditions of (moderate) scarcity. Then the above mentioned argument holds as well – namely, that in order to determine to what extent it is to be fulfilled, each claim has to be judged in relation to the claims of all others and all available resources. In addition, the moral urgency of lifting people above dire poverty cannot be invoked to demonstrate the moral urgency of everyone having enough. In both forms of scarcity – i.e., with satiable and insatiable claims – the social right or claim to goods cannot be conceived as something absolute or non-comparative. Egalitarians may thus conclude that distributive justice is always comparative. This would suggest that distributive equality, especially equality of life-conditions, should play a fundamental role in any adequate theory of justice in particular, and of morality in general.

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5 What is Equality? Part 4: Political Equality

• Published: February 2003
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In a series of essays, I have been studying the idea of equality beginning in a principle—the abstract egalitarian principle—that states the idea in its most abstract form. This principle stipulates that government must act to make the lives of citizens better, and must act with equal concern for the life of each member. We reach a useful, practical theory about what equality requires by constructing and testing concrete interpretations—conceptions—of that principle, to decide which conception is, all things considered, the best. Of course the abstract egalitarian principle cannot decide all matters: government and politics face a variety of issues, at every level of abstraction and concreteness, that cannot be answered simply by selecting among different interpretations or conceptions of abstract equality. And yet the influence of the egalitarian principle will be pervasive for any society that accepts it. The preferred interpretation of equal concern will affect not only the design of all fundamental institutions of government, but also the particular decisions each of these institutions makes.

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Political Equality: An Essay in Democratic Theory

1991, The American Political Science Review

Related Papers

Philosophy & Public Affairs

Daniel Viehoff

This essay seeks to provide a justification for the ‘egalitarian authority claim’, according to which citizens of democratic states have a moral duty to obey (at least some) democratically made laws because they are the outcome of an egalitarian procedure. It begins by considering two prominent arguments that link democratic authority to a concern for equality. Both are ultimately unsuccessful; but their failures are instructive, and help identify the conditions that a plausible defense of the egalitarian authority claim must meet. The first argument (discussed in Section II, after Section I clarifies what authority and democracy are taken to consist in) appeals to the simple idea that fairness disallows granting ourselves special privileges that we deny to others; and it suggests that fairness thus requires obeying democratic decisions rather than acting on our own judgment of the right policy. I show that this argument fails; and its failure indicates that we must invoke a less formal, more substantive understanding of equality to justify democratic authority. The second argument, recently suggested by Thomas Christiano, does just that. Democratic authority is, on this account, not justified by the formal demand for equal treatment but by the distinctive value of showing public equal respect to our fellow citizens. Such public equal respect requires treating as authoritative the democratic decisions in which citizens had an equal say. This argument does not, however, succeed in its goal either. While it plausibly establishes the value of democratic institutions, it does not provide grounds for a duty to obey democratic decisions (Section III). This essay thus develops an alternative argument, according to which egalitarian procedures have authority because, by obeying them, we can avoid acting on certain considerations that must be excluded from our intrinsically valuable egalitarian relationships. The authority of democratic decisions rests on the egalitarian fact that none of us has more of a say than any other, not on the further fact (crucial to the previous argument) that each of us has a positive say (Sections IV and V). The argument in turn helps us understand the limits of democratic authority: it is constrained not only by a demand for equality, and by considerations of justice, but also by a requirement of mutual concern without which our egalitarian relationships lack their distinctive value (Section VI).

Shlomi Segall

Equality is an undisputed political and moral value. But until quite recently, political philosophers have not fully explored its complexity. This article tackles the vast literature on equality and egalitarianism of the past thirty-five years or so, and shows how complex and multi-layered the concept of equality can be. Specifically, it unpacks three major questions we might ask about equality. We first ask what is equality. This question can be unpacked into two sub-questions. Distinguishing first between formal and distributive accounts of equality, we may ask what the currency of egalitarianism can be. The article goes through currencies such as welfare, resources, and capabilities, showing their respective strengths and weaknesses. A second important sub-question here is what is the relevant scope as well as temporal dimensions of equality. Among whom is equality valuable, and in what time-frame, precisely, is it valuable? This hints at our second major question, namely concerning the value of equality. Is equality indeed valuable, or are we confusing it for some other value, be it giving priority to the worse off, or lifting individuals above a certain threshold of deprivation. The article goes through some famous criticisms to equality's purported lack of value (the leveling down objection), explores some potential answers, and then examines the relative strength of equality's two main rivals, namely priority and sufficiency. The third major question we ask concerns what is the proper account of egalitarian justice. In particular, setting aside the question of currency, should our conception of distributive justice be informed by responsibility-sensitive accounts, or rather be focused on a responsibility-insensitive accounts that moreover place an emphasis on equality of relations rather than individuals holdings? We explore this in the two final sections, one devoted to understanding luck egalitarianism, and the other to its rival, relational egalitarianism.

Political Theory

Samuel Bagg

Robert Jubb

This paper investigates how political theorists and philosophers should understand egalitarian political demands in light of the increasingly important realist critique of much of contemporary political theory and philosophy. It suggests, first, that what Martin O'Neill has called non-intrinsic egalitarianism is, in one form at least, a potentially realistic egalitarian political project and second, that realists may be compelled to impose an egalitarian threshold on state claims to legitimacy under certain circumstances. Non-intrinsic egalitarianism can meet realism’s methodological requirements because it does not have to assume an unavailable moral consensus since it can focus on widely acknowledged bads rather than contentious claims about the good. Further, an appropriately formulated non-intrinsic egalitarianism may be a minimum requirement of an appropriately realistic claim by a political order to authoritatively structure some of its members' lives. Without at least a threshold set of egalitarian commitments, a political order seems unable to be transparent to many of its worse off members under a plausible construal of contemporary conditions.

Fabien Tarrit

The paper intends to propose an elaboration of basics for theories on inequalities, on the basis of equality as a central concern. In the first part we discuss the extent to which Rawls’s contribution is a breakthrough in the theories of justice, against utilitarianism. His Theory of Justice raises a number of debates on the nature of equality. In the second part together with a conflict that may appear between equality and basically non egalitarian values we discuss Ronald Dworkin’s and Amartya Sen’s contributions on the issue of what is to be equalized, among various candidates. In the third part, we will discuss G.A. Cohen’s contribution. His internal critique of Rawls’s theory is methodological rather than substantial, and is mainly related to the implementation of equality and to the way equality is to be applied. Mots clés : Equality, welfare, resources, capabilities, basic structure Les working papers d’économie et gestion du laboratoire Regards sont édités après présentation...

Kenneth Baynes

Philosophical Studies

Harry Brighouse

The Future of Democratic Equality, 2009 (Routledge Press), introductory chapter

Joseph Schwartz

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy

Several democratic theorists have recently sought to vindicate the ideal of equal political power (“political equality”) by tying it to the non-derivative value of egalitarian relationships. This chapter critically discusses such arguments. It clarifies what it takes to vindicate the ideal of political equality, and distinguishes different versions of the relational egalitarian argument for it. Some such arguments appeal to the example of a society without social status inequality (such as caste or class structures); others to personal relationships among equals, like friendship. Each strategy faces problems. After discussing what social status consists in, the chapter argues that social status equality does not require an equal distribution of power, but only that unequal distributions are not justified on grounds incompatible with the citizens’ fundamental equal moral standing. By contrast, personal relationships among equals do require equal power; but establishing that their norms apply to our political community is challenging.

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Plato on Equality and Democracy

• First Online: 17 November 2018

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• Christopher J. Rowe 5  

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Democracy is “an attractively anarchic and colourful regime, it seems, one that accords a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike” ( Rep. VIII 558c2-4). The present essay raises three questions in particular. (1) What precisely is the criticism of democracy here? (2) What kind or kinds of equality and inequality matter for Plato? As all sides agree, he is interested in proportional equality more than he is in its arithmetical counterpart, so that true equality, for him, will always turn out to be a kind of (arithmetical) inequality. But (3) inequality in what? Plato undoubtedly thinks the good and wise deserve a greater share in power just because they are good and wise; does he also think, as some have claimed, that the wealthy also deserve a greater share just because they are wealthy? The answer proposed to this last question in the following essay is a clear no: even if Plato holds wealth to be a good of some sort, the possession of an unequal share of it—despite what may be suggested, prima facie , by the presence of property classes in the Laws —is not, and is not even a part of, the reason for giving the wealthy an unequal share of power. The final proposal offered by this essay is that if goodness and wisdom are indeed for Plato the only good(s) actually relevant to the distribution of power, and if—as he seems to hold—true goodness and wisdom belong only to gods, then there will be a case for saying that, even for Plato, the supposed arch-enemy of democracy, democracy (in however limited a form) turns out to be the only possible outcome, whether under non-ideal or under ideal conditions.

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Vlastos ( 1981 , p. 194).

A footnote refers for this democratic sentiment to Athenagoras in Thucydides VI 38.5, along with Aristotle in Politics 1301a34.

Vlastos’ footnote : ‘Cf. the definition of dikaiosunê at 443ab …’.

See, e.g., Barrow ( 1975 , pp. 106–107), Santas ( 2010 , p. 159), and Wallach ( 2001 , p. 378).

A passage to which I shall cite more or less in full, and discuss, in Sect. 4.3 below.

Popper ( 2013 , p. 92)

This is apparently a loose paraphrase of Book VI 757a.

That is, that everyone is naturally/born equal, which is attributed by Plato to his opponents, according to Popper , despite not being explicitly used by them.

Thus, for example, the system of selection for membership of the upper two “classes” in the Republic presupposes significant differences in natural aptitudes. The point should not be pressed too hard, in light of what I take to be Plato’s continuing engagement with what has come to be called “Socratic” intellectualism; for intellectualism itself may well be fundamentally egalitarian in its implications. But these are topics for another occasion.

See, e.g., Republic 558a10-b7 (cited in full in note 20 below).

Compare the maxim “Nothing is more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people,” which towards the end of the last century seems to have begun being attributed, somewhat mysteriously (especially by elitist educationalists), to Thomas Jefferson—but might possibly be yet another example of what I claim to be the standard misreading of Plato, Republic VIII 558c3-4.

Or rather, caricature, or satire; as he knows perfectly well, no actual democracy, past or present, has ever operated like the one he has Socrates sketch.

Athenian democracy on the whole seems to have recognized the need to elect qualified generals , in particular (though with occasional, and disastrous, exceptions).

Which, of course, in an ancient participatory democracy alternated to a far greater degree than they do in a modern representative democracy; “the ruled” may actually be “the rulers” next year, or even next month. Nevertheless, of course, the whole system depended on the maintenance of the distinction between “ruler” and “ruled”—and the survival of Athenian democracy , for example, for a good century and a half, in some form or another, is evidence of how well that system actually worked.

This continues: “And the net effect of all this, … when it all comes together, is the sensitivity one readily observes in the souls of the citizens, which makes them angry and unable to put up with it if anyone tries to tie them down in the slightest respect. The final stage I think you’ll recognize: a disregard for the very laws themselves, whether written or unwritten, to make quite sure nobody lords it over them, in any way at all” (563d3-e1).

Not, of course, men and women in Plato’s beautiful city, but that city is not what is in question in this context.

Coming as it does just before the “terminal disease of a city,” tyranny, in the list of constitutions in Republic VIII, and after oligarchy and timocracy, democracy may appear to be valued less highly than either of the latter two. That might tempt us to suppose that democracy’s criterion for distributing power (or its lack of one) is being said to be worse than oligarchy’s as well as timocracy’s (timocracy, perhaps, being the first deviation from the best, might reasonably be expected to be rated higher). It will be one of the chief tasks of the following sections to establish what Plato thought about plutocracy. Meanwhile, I note that the order in which oligarchy and democracy are discussed—given that aristocracy/the best must come first, timocracy second, and tyranny last—is likely to have as much to do with poetic/narrative convenience (see Rep. VIII 545d-e) as anything else. And as befits a caricature or satire, the whole treatment of democracy will be an account of a (possible?) democracy, even if it builds on features taken by the caricaturist/satirizer to be typical.

It may be objected, in defense of the Popper/Vlastos reading, that the very last feature of democracy Socrates mentions before his summing up is actually its lack of interest in excellence (Vlastos’s “merit”) when it comes to the question of the qualifications it looks for in politicians: “And the tolerance of the democratic city, its utter lack of meticulousness, its contempt for all those high-minded things we said when we were founding our city, about how only someone born with an utterly exceptional nature could ever become a good man, if from earliest childhood his play was not surrounded by beauty, and all his pursuits and activities likewise—how magnificently it tramples over all of this! It doesn’t care a bit what kinds of things a person did before he entered politics and started running things, and gives him respect on the sole condition that he declares himself well disposed towards the people” ( Rep. 558a10-b7). (One might also call in aid the clause “even if he’s qualified to do so” at 557e2; though my note 14 is intended to block this). But the obvious response to this objection will be that timocracy and oligarchy “trample over all of this” no less than democracy does; they may care about the qualifications of their politicians, but not to the extent that they want them to be “good men.” If Republic 558c2-4 is supposed to be summing up the specific characteristics of democracy, it cannot be referring to its neglect of the criterion of excellence in particular (or rather, the need to nurture excellence: see text following note 10 above), though it will certainly not exclude excellence/merit (as the result of nurture).

“Yes, Callicles, wise men claim that partnership and friendship, orderliness, self-control, and justice hold together heaven and earth, and gods and men, and that is why they call this universe an ordering ( kosmos ), my friend, and not an undisciplined state of disorder ( akosmia ). You seem to me not to pay attention attention to these things, even though you’re a wise man in these matters. You’ve failed to notice that geometrical equality ( hê isotês hê geômetrikê ) has great power among both gods and men, and you suppose that you ought to practice getting the greater share (i.e., when you do not deserve it, and so in contravention of the rule of geometrical equality). That’s because you neglect geometry” ( Grg. 507e6-508a8, trans. Zeyl, modified).

See Laws VI 756e-758a.

Reading penian in c2. See below.

The syntax of the second sentence of which is tortuous, as indicated by what has – on my reading – to be supplied (inside the two sets of square brackets) in order to make it into English or, for that matter, Greek.

See Popper ( 2013 , p. 571, note 20 to chapter 6).

“The constitution proposed in the Laws has no element of monarchy at all; it is nothing but oligarchy and democracy, leaning rather towards oligarchy” (Aristotle, Pol. II 1266a5-7, trans. Jowett, modified), a claim that Aristotle goes on to explain in the following lines, ending with “Thus a preponderance will be given to the better sort of people, who have the larger incomes, because some of the lower classes ( hoi dêmotikoi ), not being compelled, will not vote” (1266a20-22). Not long before, however, he has suggested classifying Magnesia as a “polity”: “The whole system of government tends to be neither democracy nor oligarchy, but something of a mean between them, which is usually called a polity, and is composed of the heavy-armed soldiers” ( Pol. 1265b27-9). See Sect. 4.5 below.

Ernest Barker’s title for Book 3 is “The Lessons of History,” as Schofield reminds us.

In Laws VI 756e-758a, a passage that explains the two different kinds of equality, arithmetic and geometrical, and indeed focusses the latter entirely on aretê (757c).

That the four timêmata have exclusively to do with differences in wealth is shown by the rule for promotion and demotion between them (744d-e). But see further Sect. 4.4  below.

The likelihood of a covert reference to aretê in the phrase “use of wealth” is also lessened by the fact that aretê has just been mentioned as a separate criterion (“[recognition must be given] not just to aretê , [a person’s] ancestors’ and his own …”).

I.e., four times the value of an individual holding (V 744e). N.b. the careful phrasing in 744b7-8, ‘when they become richer instead of poor or poor instead of rich …’: wealth and poverty, in Magnesia, are strictly relative categories.

The apparatus in the Oxford text is insufficiently informative to make it clear which reading is better supported by the manuscript evidence (both readings are found, and each has its supporters among editors); for the sake of argument I assume that the evidence will support either.

Ending a sentence here, and beginning a new one (‘It is not just his personal virtues … but use of wealth or poverty’), which has the effect of appearing to restrict ‘worth’ to financial worth.

In Book III, property and wealth come last in the list of things a properly organized city will value).

Schofield himself appears to read penias .

See I 631c4-5. Given that the whole immediate context is about wealth and property, the sudden reference to use of wealth is surprising: one might have expected a reference to wealth and/or poverty pure and simple.

See 744d3-4.

For a similar, but significantly different, list of goods see Laws I 631c-d.

Republic V 454c. It is also strange that he should mention strength and beauty, and ancestral aretê , as things to be taken account of (“… so that office-holding and taxes and distributions may take account of the valuation of each person’s worth not just by reference to excellence, his ancestors’ and his own, or degree of bodily strength or good looks …,” 744b5-c1), when actually appearing not to take them into account at all. See Sect. 4.4 below.

This sort of layering of meaning is not unusual in the Laws : for other worked examples, see Rowe ( 2012b , pp. 367–387).

Strangely put before an individual’s own excellence in b7.

VI 756b-e. At III 698b-e, the Athenian half-suggests a causal relationship between the existence of four functioning Solonian property-classes —prior to the rise of extreme democracy—and Athens’ victory at Marathon; but ultimately he seems to place that victory rather lower in the list of human achievements than we might have expected. See Rowe ( 2016 ).

As did their Solonian counterparts in the Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries, when they gradually lost their relevance for office-holding, though not for military service (or for colonization: interestingly, following a decree of 450 colonists could only be recruited from the lowest two classes). See Hansen ( 1991 , p. 45). But for the Athenian of the Laws that was a symptom of decline, not of improvement.

See Sect. 4.4 below.

See above all Apology 30b2-4, as well as Rowe ( 2007 , chapter 1, section 1).

The Laws was, as everyone agrees, the last work of Plato’s to be finished (if it was finished).

And, for someone who—as all Lives of Plato inform us—was himself a member of the Athenian aristocracy, remarkably uninterested in the claims of birth.

The kai dê kai in 757c3 might be said introduce some doubt on this point; my own view is that it merely marks the transition from the general principle to the specific—and only relevant—case.

It’s impossible to combine extreme wealth with goodness, the Athenian declares at V 742e, or at any rate wealth as ordinarily understood; money is by its very nature a means to an end, or ends—it is for the sake of caring for the body and, more importantly, for the soul (V 743d).

See Rowe ( 2010a ).

That is, as opposed to tyranny. See 757d.

Compare the list in 757d3 of things the legislator is not to look to: “to a small group of tyrants [like the oligarchic grouping at Athens who cam to be known as the ‘Thirty Tyrants’?], or a single tyrant, or force somehow emanating from the demos.”

See Sect. 4.2 above.

With whom, presumably, they may very well overlap.

That is, Trevor Saunders’s (in Cooper 1997 ), which I have been using, and modifying, throughout this essay.

The Laws here is clearly applying familiar Socratic ideas, but in a new context: of the landed middle class rather than of the barefoot philosopher.

Kraut ( 2010 , especially section 7, “The Fragility of Magnesian Virtue”).

Kraut ( 2010 , p. 66).

Kraut ( 2010 , p. 58).

I refer here to Hannah Arendt. See Sheffield ( forthcoming ).

An argument for the ambitious claims in this sentence can be found in Rowe ( 2011 ).

See Rowe ( 2017 and forthcoming), with the last four pages of Morrison ( 2007 ).

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Rowe, C.J. (2018). Plato on Equality and Democracy. In: Anagnostopoulos, G., Santas, G. (eds) Democracy, Justice, and Equality in Ancient Greece. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 132. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96313-6_4

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C.S. Lewis on Equality and Our Core Misconception About Democracy

By maria popova.

“The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former,” wrote the great French philosopher Simone Weil shortly before her untimely and patriotic death as she contemplated the crucial difference between our rights and our obligations . “A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds.” Nowhere do we muddle these two notions more liberally than in our treatment of democracy and its foundational principle of equality — a basic right to be conferred upon every human being, but also something the upkeep of which demands our active participation and contribution.

That’s what C.S. Lewis (November 29, 1898–November 22, 1963) examines in a superb 1943 essay titled “Equality,” originally published in The Spectator three days after Weil’s death and later included in Present Concerns ( public library ) — a posthumous anthology of Lewis’s timeless and timely journalistic essays.

A generation before Leonard Cohen contemplated democracy’s foibles and redemptions , Lewis writes at the peak of WWII as history’s deadliest and most unredeemable failure of democracy is sweeping Europe:

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure… The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Parker Palmer’s notion of democracy as the “politics of the brokenhearted,” Lewis expands upon his counterintuitive case for equality:

I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent… Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.

In a passage of chilling poignancy and timeliness today, as we witness tyrants rise to power by playing to people’s craving for supremacy as a hedge against insecurity and fear, Lewis writes:

There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. That is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values: offers food to some need which we have starved.

Just as true generosity lies in mastering the osmosis of giving and receiving , true equality, Lewis argues, requires the parallel desires to be honored and to honor. He writes:

When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but as an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other, the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow, is a prosaic barbarian. […] Every intrusion of the spirit that says “I’m as good as you” into our personal and spiritual life is to be resisted just as jealously as every intrusion of bureaucracy or privilege into our politics. Hierarchy within can alone preserve egalitarianism without. Romantic attacks on democracy will come again. We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they.

Complement Present Concerns with Lewis on why we read , the essence of friendship , what it really means to have free will in a universe of fixed laws, his ideal daily routine , and the key to authenticity in writing , then revisit Walt Whitman on how literature bolsters democracy .

— Published November 29, 2016 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/11/29/c-s-lewis-equality-democracy/ —

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Visions of Society

Aristotle’s philosophy of equality, peace, & democracy, matt qvortrup argues that aristotle’s political philosophy is surprisingly modern..

The son of a doctor, Aristotle was born in the city of Stagira in Macedonia in the year 384 BC, and was educated at Plato’s Academy. When his mentor Plato died in 347 BC, the Macedonian went home and became the tutor of Alexander, the son of King Philip of Macedon. His pupil, who later gained the suffix ‘the Great’, was rather fond of his teacher, and is supposed to have said, “I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.”

Aristotle stayed at the court of Alexander until 335 BC, when he founded his own academy, the Lyceum, in Athens. He remained in Athens until 323 BC, when anti-Macedonian sentiments forced him to leave. “I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy” he said, with reference to the execution of Socrates, and fled to the island of Chalcis, where he died a year later, in 322 BC.

Reading Aristotle is easier than you might think. Even those who are not able to read him in the original Greek cannot fail to be enamoured by his enthusiasm. A fascinating thing about Aristotle’s Politika (in English normally translated as The Politics ), for example, is the way this enormously erudite man got carried away in his lectures. For instance, Aristotle simply could not help telling his students about a certain Hippodamus, the son of Eryphon. That Fifth Century BC Athenian was “the first man not engaged in politics to speak on the subject of the best Constitution.” According to Aristotle, this first philosopher of politics was “somewhat eccentric in his general mode of life owing to his desire for distinction… [he] lived fussily, with a quantity of hair and expensive ornaments and a quantity of cheap clothes – not only in winter but also in the summer” ( The Politics II, 1268a).

This is perhaps a glimpse of how entertaining Aristotle could be when he lectured in his Lyceum – how he could spellbind his audience with seemingly irrelevant but highly entertaining anecdotes. But his aside about Hippodamus also suggests that Aristotle – the founder of psychology, political science, logic, poetics, physics, biology, and many other disciplines – had a childlike joy in telling his audience about all he knew. No wonder Cicero (106-43 BC), the Roman statesman and philosopher, noted that Aristotle’s writings were veniet flumen orationis aureum fundens – “like a pouring out of gold” ( Academia Priora , Book II). And yet we don’t even have Aristotelian treatises: his only surviving books are lecture notes.

Aristotle & Progressive Politics

What’s most engaging about Aristotle’s political philosophy is how modern and progressive he was. His considerations speak through the ages and can inspire those who read him more than 2,200 years later. Aristotle was not merely a philosopher who wrote about contemporary institutions and the ideal constitution (though he did that too); he had foresight, or so it seems today. Many of the issues he addressed are also ones that concern us: terrorism, inequality, and the dangers of excessive greed in a small class of wealthy individuals. Moreover, his solutions and analyses are remarkably relevant for our time. It’s both surprising and extraordinary how Aristotle’s science of government – his politike épistême – was based on ideals that arguably could have been expressed by activists on the left in the West today. For instance, perhaps surprisingly, the man who had tutored a king was no friend of the rich and powerful. Rather, this founder of political science boldly stated that “the truly democratic statesman must study how the multitude may be saved from extreme poverty” ( The Politics , 1320a). This makes him an inspiration to modern left-leaning progressives, who once again place equality and social justice at the heart of the political struggle. Aristotle was, it can fairly be said, a democratic socialist two thousand years before this economic doctrine was established. He insisted that “measures must be contrived that bring about lasting prosperity for all” (1320a), and like a present-day centre-left politician, he was willing to advocate the redistribution of wealth on the grounds that this would be better for the state and the nation as a whole. He even spelled out how this could be done: “The proper course,” he wrote, “is to collect all the proceeds of the revenue into a fund and distribute this in lump sums.” Indeed, he even had a policy that suggested how the needy should be “supplied with capital to start them in business” (1320a). This is not a million miles away from what enlightened liberals and social democrats espouse today. And like modern centre-left progressives, he was adamant that redistribution and state intervention not only benefitted the poor, but that this was “advantageous also for the well-to-do” (1320a).

Aristotle was not anti-business, but he was always clear that “money was brought into existence for the purpose of exchange” and not as an end in itself (1258b). He famously made a distinction between oikonomia – “the art of household management” (1258b) and kremastike – “the art of getting rich” (1253b). His misgivings about the excesses of self-interest was reflected in his policy prescriptions: “the first among the indispensable services [rendered by a state] is the superintendence of the market” (1321b), he wrote in a perhaps prescient comment on the dangers of deregulation. Who needs to read Thomas Piketty’s otherwise impressive Capital in the Twenty-First Century , or Nobel laureate Paul Krugman’s columns in the New York Times , when they can read Politika ? Aristotle should be an inspiration to today’s centre-left not least because the bearded Macedonian based his political thinking on a solid foundation of morals and a concern for those with fewer resources. Indeed, this philosophical basis makes Aristotle superior to many present-day public intellectuals. Today politicians usually appeal to self-interest and utility. For Aristotle, conversely, “to seek utility everywhere is unsuited for free men” (1338b). Rather, a political science should be based on recognition that “the good life is the chief aim of society” (1278b). Hence Aristotle wrote that it is “the business of the lawgiver to create the good society.” For as he wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics , the prequel to The Politics , politics, being an extension of ethics and morals, “legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from, and the end of this political science must be the good for man.” ( Nicomachean Ethics , 1094a) In other words, we have politics, and we teach political philosophy, because we want to create true happiness, or eudaimonia – to achieve a state where our “actions accord with virtue ( arête ) [and] with an adequate supply of goods in a complete life.” ( Nicomachean Ethics , 1101a)

Politics is not just about self-interest and aggrandizement, then. It is about recognizing that “the state is essentially a community.” ( The Politics , 1260b) In plain words, “the state is not merely a sharing of a common locality for the purpose of preventing mutual injury and exchanging goods.” (1280b) Systems of exchange and financial matters, Aristotle admits, “are necessary preconditions of a state’s existence. Yet even if all these conditions are present, that does not make a state. For a state is a partnership of families and clans living well and its object is the full and independent life.” (1280b)

Aristotle & Political Violence

Of course, not all of Aristotle’s views have stood the test of times – his views on slavery and women are particularily problematic. But this does not mean we should disregard his philosophy. After all, few Christians agree entirely with the Bible, both Old and New Testaments; and most modern (neo-) Darwinists allow themselves to disagree with parts of the Origin of Species .

Most prominent political philosophers were strangely one- or two-dimensional. Thomas Hobbes focussed almost exclusively on peace and security; John Locke was concerned about property and liberty; and Karl Marx focussed his thinking on attacking an unjust economic system. By contrast, Aristotle, even more than Plato before him, was a political thinker who addressed all the major issues: education, equality, democracy, justice, war, peace, and social unrest. It is not least because of his interest in revolutions and uprisings that his philosophy is so relevant for present day politics and policy-making.

Political violence, revolutions and terror characterize our current political debates. These issues were also hotly discussed in Aristotle’s time. It’s remarkable that here too he reached some of the same conclusions as political scientists have discovered today. Like modern political scientists who have found that terrorism is caused by disenfranchisement, Aristotle also recognised that lack of political influence breeds anger, aggression, and ultimately violence. He wrote “men… cause revolutions when they are not allowed to share honours and if they are unjustly or insolently treated” (1316b); and “angry men attack out of revenge not out of ambition” (1311a); and he posed the rhetorical question “how is it possible for individuals who do not share in the government of the state to be friendly towards the constitution?” (1268b). The answer was, of course, negative. So, fundamentally, Aristotle was of the view that people (for him, men) who are excluded from political influence ultimately resort to violence. Niccoló Machiavelli (1470-1527) later echoed Aristotle here when he stressed that “it is necessary that republics have laws that enable the mass of the population to give vent to the hostility it feels.” For when no such mechanism exists, “extra legal methods will be employed and without doubt these will have much worse consequences than legal ones” ( Discoursi , 1531, p.102).

To maintain a peaceful political system, then, Aristotle thinks that it is necessary to involve all the citizens, for political systems endure because those in power “treat those outside the constitution well” and they do so “by bringing their leading men into the constitution” (1308a). This might seem idealistic and naïve. It is not. A recent study by one of the world’s most prominent political scientists, Arend Lijphart, found that the more democratic states – the countries where minorities are included in the process of democratic decision-making – were six times less likely to experience fatal terrorist attacks than less democratic ones ( Patterns of Democracy , 2012, p.270). While not quoting Aristotle (modern political scientists seem strangely reluctant to cite the classics), state-of-the-art political science comes to the same conclusion as Aristotle did twenty-two centuries ago.

The ancient thinker’s logic is straightforward, and his lesson is clear: more democratic engagement leads to less inequality and lower levels of violence (terrorism). It is difficult to overstate how progressive and prophetic this view is, especially when compared with what passes for public policies today. Looking back over the past fifteen years, in many countries the policies pursued have been characterised by increased surveillance (in Britain in the form of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014) and a preference for dealing with terrorism and violence through military action. The results of these policies have not been impressive, and that’s putting it mildly. If we use the figures from the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Terrorism Index , if we exclude Syria and Nigeria the world has seen an 80% increase in the numbers of terrorist attacks. If we include these countries there has been a seven-fold increase (statistics based on 2015 Global Terrorism Index Report ).

At a time when the favoured response to political violence is retaliation, police surveillance, and the ‘War on Terror’, it is worth reflecting on Aristotle’s line, “men attacking under the influence of anger are reckless of themselves” (1315a). Indeed, terrorists are still not deterred by the prospect of violence, as the aforementioned statistics show. It is arguably testament to the greatness of Aristotle that he recognised that it is citizen engagement and political influence, and not force, which prevent social violence and political strife. And it is indicative of his empiricist approach that he sought proof for his assertions in actual facts.

Aristotle & Constitutional Democracy

Aristotle, always the empiricist, collected everything from zoological specimens to political facts: he wrote commentaries on an estimated 170 ancient constitutions. Unfortunately, only one of these is preserved, the Constitution of Athens , discovered in Oxyrhynchus in Upper Egypt in 1879.

It is not surprising, given his obsession with facts, that Aristotle’s main proof of the beneficial influence of what he called “the democratic nature” (1308a) was drawn from his empirical studies; and especially from a comparative analysis with the remarkable democratic state of Carthage. Aristotle wrote that the proof that “its constitution is well regulated is that its populace willingly remain faithful to the political system, and that neither civil strife has arisen in any degree, nor yet a tyrant” (1272b). That Carthage was successful in avoiding revolutions and what we today would call ‘terrorism’ he says was due to its balanced constitution, one in which its parliament – ‘the Hundred and Four’ – were elected “from any class” and “by merit” (1272b). Further, in this surprisingly democratic system, the elected representatives were balanced by ‘the Elders’ – chosen by the people and by a head of government who “as a superior feature was elected” (1272b).

While Aristotle warned that government by the people could degenerate into mob rule, he maintained throughout that it is “advantageous for the form of democracy… for all the citizens to elect the magistrates and to call them to account” (1318b). Indeed, he even spoke about the “consent of the governed” (1318b) – a line later copied by Thomas Jefferson into the American Declaration of Independence.

Aristotle’s model constitution was in fact one characterised by an elected aristocracy – but an aristocracy based on uncommon prudence and intelligence, not on wealth. But even under this system of government, the people would have a greater say than under most systems of indirect democracy: in Aristotle’s ideal state, “when the Kings introduce business in the assembly, they do not merely let the people sit and listen to the decisions that have been taken by their rulers, but the people have the sovereign decision” (1278a).

Why did this intellectual snob place such faith in the ordinary people? Why did he trust them to make good decisions? He recognised that some are more intelligent than others; but also acknowledged that many individuals deliberating together would have a greater combined knowledge than even the wisest person. His argument here is worth quoting at length:

“It is possible that the many, when they come together, may be better, not individually but collectively, just as public dinners to which many contribute are better than those supplied at one man’s cost. For where there are many, each individual, it may be argued, has some portion of virtue and wisdom, and when they have come together, just as the multitude becomes a single man with many feet and many hands and many senses, so also it becomes one personality as regards the moral and intellectual faculties.” (1281b)

This, he concluded, “is why the general public is a better judge,” for “different men can judge a different part” (1281b). For this reason, “it is necessary for all to share alike in ruling and being ruled.” (1332b)

It is difficult to find a more precise and succinct case for democracy than this. True, the same sentiment was expressed by the likes of Marsilius of Padua (1275-1343). “Laws” wrote that Italian in 1324, “should be laid before the assembled citizen-body for approval or rejection… for the less learned citizen can sometimes perceive something that should be corrected with regard to a proposed law even though they would not have known how to discover [the law] in the first place” ( The Defender of the Peace , p.80). But we ought to remember that this thinker, like Machiavelli, was brought up on a solid dose of Aristotle’s teachings and steeped in his writings. Both men had learned from the Macedonian master – just as we ought to do today.

Aristotle speaks through the ages. His writings are proof, if such is needed, that the philosophy of the ancient masters is not a historical relic but a timeless guide. A democrat, a defender of social equality, and an opponent of the authoritarian state, Aristotle should be on the reading list for all those who support radical or progressive causes.

© Dr Matt Qvortrup 2016

Matt Qvortrup is Professor of Political Science at Coventry University. This article is a shorter version of his inaugural professorial address, which he’ll give in Coventry on 12th October.

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The Role of Women in Democratic Transition

Date: Wednesday, 23 November 2011

Remarks by Ms. Lakshmi Puri Deputy Executive Director of UN Women at High Level Human Rights Conference Sakharov Prize Network Public Event “Role of women in democratic transition Panel on “Women's Rights in Times of Change European Parliament. Brussels, Belgium, 23 November 2011.

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I am honored to be part of this Sakharov debate on the “Role of women in democratic transition. I would like to thank the European Parliament for organizing this event and commend all the Sakharov laureates for the impressive work they were and are engaged in. You are an inspiration for all of us.

Women's full participation in national and local politics, in the economy, in academia and the media is fundamental to democracy and essential to the achievement of sustainable development and peace in all contexts — during peace, through conflict and post-conflict, and during political transitions. If a political system neglects women's participation, if it evades accountability for women's rights, it fails half of its citizens. Indeed, true democracy is based on the realization of human rights and gender equality. If one of these falters, so do the others. Weak democracy remains a major barrier to the enjoyment of human rights. Likewise, the failure to respect human rights is an impediment to effective democracy.

Women represent 3.5 billion citizens, yet in many countries they face a wide range of constraints to effective participation — as candidates, voters and elected officials. The consequences of constraints on women's participation are well-known. Women make up less than 10 percent of world leaders. Globally less than one in five members of parliament is a woman. And the 30 percent critical mass mark for women's representation in parliament has been reached or exceeded in only 28 countries. Women have found themselves consistently limited by traditional gender stereotypes regarding women's ability to assume leadership positions. This is unfortunately true even in healthy democracies. These constraints must be removed.

Moreover, true democracy must be based on checks and balances and accountability of institutions that allow women to seek redress when their rights are violated. The judiciary, parliamentary oversight processes, and other institutions must act as guarantors of the rule of law and of women's enjoyment of their human rights. Ensuring that avenues of redress are open to women's needs and protect their rights is a major step towards the realization of equality. We have seen women all over the world use the courts to get justice and obtain decisions that benefit themselves and millions of other women in relation to citizenship, inheritance, sexual harassment and other issues.

Gender equality and women's empowerment are a matter of justice and human rights, but they are also essential for the achievement of all human rights for all, for the development of all societies and for our collective global future. We must ensure that we capitalize on the potential and talents of all citizens, not just of one-half of the population. We need the best leaders we can find to confront our challenges — poverty, hunger, disease, environmental degradation, violence — and many of these leaders are women. Women bring their own insights and perspectives, and this improves decision-making.

Empowering women also makes good economic sense. The World Bank and others have shown that increasing women's access to quality education, good jobs, land and other resources contributes to inclusive growth, sustainable development and long-term prosperity. The most recent FAO report on the State of the World's Agriculture estimates that closing the productivity gap arising from women's unequal access to productive resources would reduce the size of the population who are undernourished by 12 to 17 percent. Empowering women and girls and creating an environment that is conducive to making these rights a reality is a responsibility of the tallest order.

There has been progress and we must continue to build on our successes. In 1911, women were allowed to vote in just two countries in the world. Today, a century later, that right is virtually universal. Currently some 43 countries have adopted some form of election law quotas to increase women's representation in national parliaments. This year, for the first time since the United Nations was founded more than 60 years ago, the general debate of the General Assembly was opened by a woman, President Dilma Roussef, the first woman President of Brazil.

An event was also held during that session with women leaders across the world, including High Representative Catherine Ashton, who all signed on to a joint statement to increase women's political participation and decision-making in all countries. UN Women is committed to this and it supports countries throughout the world to increase women's roles as candidates and voters.

There is now a clear recognition that the realization of gender equality is the responsibility of all of us. This summer, we launched Progress of the World's Women: In Pursuit of Justice , UN Women's first flagship publication, which looked at how countries are strengthening their legal and policy frameworks to advance gender equality. We found:

139 constitutions have guarantees of gender equality; 117 countries have equal pay laws; 173 countries guarantee paid maternity leave;117 countries have laws or policies to ban/forbid sexual harassment in the workplace; 125 countries have laws to outlaw domestic violence; and 115 countries guarantee women's equal property rights.

All countries should follow suit. And of course all these laws must be backed by adequate resources and fully implemented so that women can actually benefit from them.

In the Middle East and North Africa, we are at a decisive moment. We have been impressed and awed by the women and men who are risking their lives for democracy. The Arab Spring has demonstrated to the world that women are prepared and determined to fight for human rights and democracy. They have protested with men for better living conditions, equality, and political systems that are genuinely accountable to the public. They want to remain at the forefront of these political processes that will determine their future and the future of their countries.

It is now critical to ensure full participation of men and women and the integration of women's rights in transitional structures and the reforms undertaken. Women's rights must be part of the foundation of these new beginnings, and not something to be dealt with at a later time. Change comes through working collectively to achieve concrete progress. This will only be possible with the solidarity of both women and men. This solidarity must be built through the sharing of everyday tasks and responsibilities within our homes, in our communities, and in public life.

In Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere, the speed of the transition favors already organized groups. Women's groups require significant strengthening and need our help to be positioned (i.e. properly informed and briefed on opportunities) to engage in political debates. Otherwise, they will lose out to other better-organized groups that may not have gender equality on the top of their agenda.

In Tunisia in April, we celebrated an achievement of the political reformers and women's civil society that had been unthinkable only months earlier: a draft electoral law calling for full parity in the composition of the constituent assembly. However elections on 23 October resulted in low representation in the Constituent Assembly among women.

Before closing, I would like to recall that this coming Friday we will be commemorating the International Day to end Violence against Women. Today 125 countries have specific laws that penalize domestic violence, a remarkable gain from just a decade ago. The UN Security Council now recognizes sexual violence as a deliberate tactic of war. And significant advances in international law have, for the first time, made it possible to prosecute sexual violence crimes during and after conflict.

And yet, globally 603 million women live in countries where domestic violence is not yet considered a crime. Feminicide claims far too many women's lives. Over 60 million girls are child brides. Violence against women is one of the most widespread human rights violations yet one of the least prosecuted crimes. Our joint action is needed and I know that many of the Sakharov laureates are engaged to make this happen.

Back to democracy: we have to ensure that democracy become real for all. Governments and international organizations must support the courageous and visionary individuals we salute today. UN Women appreciates and looks forward to the European Parliament's continued commitment to gender equality, human rights and democracy. We look forward to working with all partners, including the Sakharov laureates, on gender equality, human rights and democracy in the world.

Again, congratulations on a successful day to foster the Sakharov network.

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Democracy Corrupted: Apex Corruption and the Erosion of Democratic Values

Democratic values are eroding just as citizens perceive increasing corruption, with numerous cases implicating the highest-level politicians. Could perceived increases in apex corruption be weakening democracy? We first present event study analyses of more than 170 high-profile corruption scandals involving some of the most prominent politicians in 17 Latin American countries. We show that in the aftermath of such apex corruption scandals, support for democracy falls by 0.07𝑠𝑑, support for authoritarianism rises by 11% and violent protests rise by 70%. We complement these results with a field experiment in Mexico. Randomized exposure to footage of apex corruption scandals, particularly implicating politicians known for their anticorruption platforms, decreases individuals’ support for democracy by 0.15𝑠𝑑, willingness to trust politicians and neighbors in incentivized games by 18% and 11%, volunteering as election observers by 45%, and actual voter turnout by about 5𝑝𝑝, while raising stealing from local mayors by 4%. The undermining of democratic values produces latent effects that even cumulate four months later. Seeking solutions, priming national identity proved an unsuccessful antidote, but providing exposure to national stock index funds holds some promise.

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Democracy Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on democracy.

Democracy is known as the finest form of government. Why so? Because in a democracy, the people of the country choose their government. They enjoy certain rights which are very essential for any human being to live freely and happily. There are various democratic countries in the world , but India is the largest one. Democracy has withstood the test of time, and while other forms have the government has failed, democracy stood strong. It has time and again proved its importance and impact.

Significance of a Democracy

Democracy is very important for human development . When people have free will to live freely, they will be happier. Moreover, we have seen how other forms of government have turned out to be. Citizens are not that happy and prosperous in a monarchy or anarchy.

Furthermore, democracy lets people have equal rights. This ensures that equality prevails all over the country. Subsequently, it also gives them duties. These duties make them better citizens and are also important for their overall development.

Most importantly, in a democracy, the people form the government. So, this selection of the government by the citizens gives everyone a chance to work for their country. It allows the law to prevail efficiently as the rules are made by people whom they have selected.

In addition, democracy allows people of various religions and cultures to exist peacefully. It makes them live in harmony with one another. People of democracy are more tolerant and accepting of each other’s differences. This is very important for any country to be happy and prosper.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

India: A Democratic Country

India is known to be the largest democracy all over the world. After the rule of the British ended in 1947 , India adopted democracy. In India, all the citizens who are above the age of 18 get the right to vote. It does not discriminate on the basis of caste, creed, gender, color, or more.

Although India is the largest democracy it still has a long way to go. The country faces a lot of problems which do not let it efficiently function as a democracy. The caste system is still prevalent which hampers with the socialist principle of democracy. Moreover, communalism is also on the rise. This interferes with the secular aspect of the country. All these differences need to be set aside to ensure the happiness and prosperity of the citizens.

In short, democracy in India is still better than that in most of the countries. Nonetheless, there is a lot of room for improvement which we must focus on. The government must implement stringent laws to ensure no discrimination takes place. In addition, awareness programs must be held to make citizens aware of their rights and duties.

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• What is Equality in Indian Democracy ?

An Introduction

Equality is so crucial as it preserves the individual's "dignity." Dignity mainly means and the respect an individual deserves from everyone else for being a fellow human being. It is a fundamental and essential human right. This ideal case, nevertheless, does not exist. There are many forms of inequality in India even today. This is an article on equality in India or better yet this article highlights the issues of achieving equality in India and worldwide.

Why is Equality Important?

We would say, equality is to offer equivalent privileges in promising circumstances, freedoms, and status. It implies giving equivalent privileges and opportunities to all areas of individuals, In Spite of their sex, colour, and financial status, individuals should be dealt with much the same way. Individuals in India are great by heart yet with regards to correspondence, individuals are not prepared to endure this. In that manner, a singular issue turns into a mutual mob and individuals lose their lives for correspondence.

Examples of Inequality

Besides being poor, there are many types of inequality in India. One of the most common forms of inequality in India is the caste system. If a person lives in rural India, their caste identity is something they have probably learned or faced very young. If you live in urban India, some of you might think that people don't believe in caste anymore.

Omprakash Valmiki (1950–2013) is a popular Dalit writer who wrote about equality in India through his eyes. In his autobiography, Joothan, he writes, “I had to sit away from the others in the class, and that too on the floor. The mat ran out before reaching the spot I sat on. Sometimes I would have to sit way behind everybody, right near the door…sometimes they would beat me without any reason”.

The second story is also about equality in India centred on an incident that occurred in one of the largest cities in India. It's a story about Mr Ansari and Mrs Ansari who were searching for an apartment in the city on rent. They came to a property dealer to help them find a place for themselves. In the end, it took a month to look at the apartments before they found a landlady who was willing to give them a rental place. Omprakash Valmiki and Ansaris were really treated unequally on the basis of differences of caste and religion. This shows two types of inequality in India.

Recognizing Dignity

The dignity of both Omprakash Valmiki and Ansaris had been violated due to the obvious way they were treated. When people are treated unfairly, their dignity will be violated. Omprakash and the Ansaris don't really warrant to be treated like this. They deserve the same respect and dignity as everyone else.

Racial Discrimination

Individuals having a place with specific races are depicted in an underhanded way in the personalities of the small kids and they are additionally instructed not to treat them similarly. To the extreme, they were treated like a slave and they worked as a slaves in their plantation. At the point when you return and read Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream", we can comprehend that there is a class segregation and disparity were predominant in America during that time. Martin Luther King was exceptionally clear with regards to his point that all men are equivalent in this world.

Age Inequality

Age imbalance or separation is pervasive in many countries in the world. A certain age group are segregated and treated poorly, which reflects in their helpless way of living. Girl children below the age of 18 are forced to marry a man in order to avoid a financial crisis in the family. Eventhough there are many laws against child marriages like Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act , it is still prevalent among various states in our country.

Educational Inequality

Educating a boy is teaching a family and teaching a girl is teaching society. At the point when a boy gets training, he goes to work and makes himself monetarily cheerful. The parents are dependably prepared to instruct their boy and give the most ideal sort of schooling to their son’s. The way is diverse on account of a girl’s schooling and they are prepared to spend much on the son’s schooling. Despite the fact that we can see the adjustment of certain spaces on the metropolitan side, the provincial individuals are not prepared to acknowledge the change. However rural people give the schooling to their daughters, it is a type of basic or fundamental and not of Professional.

Financial Inequality

We observe individuals judge a person by their profession and not by their person, conduct and idiosyncrasy. A job chooses a man's status in the general public. Prior an individual has a place with lower local area controls to do specific job roles and the higher local area are permitted to do the best work. The occupation of a man assists with understanding his monetary status and furthermore it chooses his power and worth in the general public. An individual who possesses a lower job role isn't permitted inside the house and they should use just the patio. Consequently, an individual's calling characterises their status in the general public.

Equality in Indian Democracy

The Constitution of India acknowledges every individual as equal and understands the importance of equality in India. This means that each individual in the state, including the male and female, is a regular citizen. All castes, religions, tribes, educational and economic backgrounds are identified as similar. This is not to say that inequality has vanished. It has not. But, at the very least, the importance of equality in India for every individual is recognized in democratic India.

The recognition of equality in the Constitution includes the following provisions:

Every citizen before the law is equal.

No individual can be discriminated against on the basis of their religion, race, caste, place of birth or whether they are male or female.

Everyone has access to all public places.

Untouchability has been outlawed.

The two different ways in which the state has decided to achieve the equality guaranteed by the Constitution are, first, through legislation and, secondly, through public programs or schemes to help vulnerable communities. In addition to legislation, the government has also established a number of schemes to improve the conditions of communities and individuals who have been treated unfairly for several centuries. These schemes are designed to provide greater opportunities for people who have not had this in the past.

Although government programs play a significant role in expanding equality of opportunity, much remains to be done yet. One of the primary reasons for this is that society is changing very slowly. Although people know what is equality in Indian democracy and that discrimination is against the law, they continue to treat people unfairly. It's only when people start believing that no one is unequal, and that every person deserves respect and dignity, that present behaviours may change. Understanding of what equality is in Indian democracy is very necessary for this to happen. Establishing equality in a democratic society is a continuous struggle of individuals and the various communities in India that they contribute to. This article on equality in India briefly has covered issues attached to achieving this ideal case scenario in our democracy.

Equal Right to Vote

In a democratic country such as India, all adults, regardless of their religion, education, caste, or whether they are rich or poor, are allowed to vote. This is called the universal adult franchise and is a key aspect of all democracies. The idea of a universal adult franchise is built on the notion of equality.

Issues of Equality in Other Democracies

In many democratic nations around the world, equality remains a critical issue in the struggle of societies. In the United States, African-Americans whose forefathers were slaves brought from Africa still describe their lives today as chiefly unfair. They have been treated pretty unfairly in the US and denied equality by law.

Rosa Park had been an African-American lady. Exhausted after a long day at work, she refused to surrender her seat on the bus to a white man on 1 December 1955. Her refusal that day triggered a massive upheaval against the racial discrimination of African-Americans that emerged as the Civil Rights Movement.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discriminatory practices on the basis of race, religion or national origin. It also mentioned that all schools would be accessible to African-American children and that they'd no longer have to attend segregated schools mainly set up for them.

Measures Taken to Uphold Equality

To reduce inequality, society ought to attain equality financially, economically, and educatively. Many laws passed in the Indian Constitution like The Equal Remuneration Act, 1976, The Special Marriage Act, 1954, The Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961 is aimed to decrease the ratio of inequality. To avoid inequality and to have a fair society, following steps must be taken. 

Enable women to get a good education and to stand them on their own.

Employment should be equally divided to all races of people and give  priority to capable people.

Laws ought to be passed to save morally high-minded people.

Did You Know?

The Right to Equality is not absolute and is subjective to certain limits.

Untouchability although has been outlawed long ago, its definition is not given in the Indian Constitution.

This was the complete discussion on equality and its importance. We have laso learnt about the challenges faced in a democracy to uphold the right to equality.

FAQs on What is Equality in Indian Democracy ?

1. What was Martin Luther King's dream?

Martin Luther King dreamed of equality in the nation. It was pervassive that there was a racial discrimination during his time in America.  He imagined that one day things should be changed and people ought to understand that all men are made equivalent.

2. What are the laws passed by Indian Government against child marriage?

Prohibition of Child Marriage Act was passed to avoid child marriages before the age of 18, and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act was to protect the girl children from sexual harrasment.

3. How is education being partial to girl children?

Most of the parents’ income in India is below average and it is truly difficult for them to take care of their family on the basis of food, shelter, education and other needs. To avoid financial crises in the near future and after their lifetime, the boys in the family should take care of their sisters and their life . In such cases, they prefer to educate their sons compared with their daughters.

4. How to Control Inequality in the society?

In order to avoid mob violence and individual issues equality should be followed in the society. By passing laws and strictly adhering to it will decrease the issues and the violence. Similarly, the change should begin from ourselves while attempting to change the society. So following and educating ourselves and others will help to control inequality.

Deborah Cotton Made Us Face the Truth About America’s Past

D eborah “Big Red” Cotton and I met by getting shot together. It was a Mother’s Day afternoon during Barack Obama’s second term as America’s first Black president. We were two of 19 people gunned down in the biggest mass shooting in the modern history of New Orleans, a city stained by racism and violence since its time as the biggest slave market in North America. The shooting targeted a second line parade, an iconic local ritual that evolved from the burial rites enslaved Africans brought with them to Louisiana starting in 1722 and that later helped give birth to jazz. To desecrate such a sacred gathering, New Orleans singer John Boutte said, was “ like bringing a gun to church and starting to shoot people. It’s just hateful.”

Gravely wounded, Cotton was not expected to live through the night. But she held on long enough to dictate a statement that a close friend delivered to a hastily called City Council meeting. A day after the shooting, a surveillance video had surfaced that showed a Black man watching as the parade passed left to right. Suddenly, the man plunged into the crowd—which consisted almost entirely of Black men, women, and children—and began firing a handgun at point blank range. As people ran and threw themselves to the ground in terror, the gunman kept firing until he emptied his weapon, then ran away.

Cotton’s City Council statement implored the people of New Orleans to stop and think before passing judgment. “Do you know what it takes to be so disconnected in your heart that you walk out into a gathering of hundreds of people who look just like you and begin firing?” she asked.  Alluding to the bleak circumstances facing many young Black men in New Orleans—parents absent or impoverished, abysmal schools, rampant gang and police violence, few job options beyond menial labor or drug dealing—she added, “These young men have been separated from us by so much trauma.”

Thanks to what Cotton and the police officers investigating the shooting both labeled “a miracle,” she did live through the night. In fact, I connected with her in New Orleans a few months later. She’d been discharged from the hospital by then, though her return to normal life was uncertain at best. Some vital organs had been severely compromised or outright removed. The doctors said she had many more surgeries ahead.

When we spoke, after telling me to call her "Deb," she shared that she often felt nauseous, anxious, and sometimes depressed these days. Yet she evinced not the slightest anger toward the two gunmen who had shot us and seventeen other people at a ritual that, as she well knew, was sacred to Black identity in New Orleans. Instead, she reiterated her initial response.

“I try to put myself in other people’s shoes in life,” Cotton told me. “I asked myself, ‘What has happened to put those young men in such a dead-hearted place that they would shoot into a crowd of people who looked just like them?’  That’s what’s so striking to me. They weren’t shooting at white men; they weren’t shooting at Black women. They were shooting at other Black men. There’s a level of self-hatred there that is so profound. It’s like they’re trying to wipe themselves out.”

Today, Cotton’s message of mercy and understanding toward people who have done us harm, or who we fear will do us harm, is much-needed balm for a nation that has been polarized by figures and forces spreading division and hatred.  When I first got to know her, Cotton’s ability to forgive made me think of her as a saint.  As I went on to write a book about the Mother’s Day shooting, I also came to see her as a prophet.  

Cotton’s belief in forgiveness, I learned, was no straightforward act of Christian charity; it was accompanied by her clear-eyed, historically grounded warning that horrors like the Mother’s Day shooting—and, for that matter, the election of an unabashed racist to succeed the nation’s first Black president—would continue to happen in the United States until the circumstances underlying those horrors were honestly named and confronted. Elaborating on her reasons for forgiving the Mother’s Day gunmen, she later explained to me that, “Racism can kill Black people even when a Black finger pulls the trigger.”

Read More: James Baldwin Insisted We Tell the Truth About This Country. The Truth Is, We’ve Been Here Before

To remedy the legacies of slavery that fueled such horrors, she advocated a strategy of truth and reconciliation, a version of which had helped South Africa to navigate the transition from apartheid to democracy in the 1990s. (As Cotton and I got to know one another, we were happy to discover that the anti-apartheid struggle had loomed large in both of our political comings of age. She even confessed to feeling a tiny bit jealous that I had been arrested with Archbishop Desmond Tutu protesting apartheid at South Africa’s embassy in Washington, D.C.)

When Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years in prison to lead a new South Africa, the country had just fought a bloody civil war after nearly 100 years of repression of the Black and mixed-race majority by the white minority.  It was far from clear that South Africa would not descend back into violence, much less that it could evolve into a unified country with freedom and equality for all.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was designed to enable South Africans to move forward “on the basis that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu [an African word connoting communal solidarity] but not for victimization.”  The Commission conducted a nationwide conversation about what happened during apartheid. Victims were invited to testify about injustices. Security officials could apply for amnesty from prosecution, provided they told the whole truth about their wrongdoings. The Commission aimed to establish a truthful record of what apartheid had done, present this truth to the South African people, and thereby lay the groundwork for a reconciliation among contending segments of the population so the country could heal.

Tutu, who chaired the Commission, later ventured that the U.S. might also benefit from a truth and reconciliation process. In words that mirror Cotton’s perception of the Mother’s Day gunmen, he wrote that victims of apartheid “often ended up internalizing the definition the top dogs had of them. . . . And then the awful demons of self-hate and self-contempt, a hugely negative self-image, took its place in the center of the victim’s being. . . . Society has conspired to fill you with self-hate, which you then project outward.”

How a racial truth and reconciliation process would operate in the U.S. is a complex question. But the necessary first step is to tell the truth. After the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville in the opening months of the Trump presidency, civil rights leader Bryan Stevenson said that only after Americans acknowledged the truth about their past could they hope to consign such outbursts of racist hatred to history. “You have to tell the truth before you can get to reconciliation,” he said in an interview with The Guardian , “and culturally we have done a terrible job of truth telling in this country about our history of racial inequality.”

Facing unpleasant truths about America’s past is not easy, but no one should blame themselves for being unaware of those truths in the first place. America’s schools, churches, legal and political systems, and news media have obscured the truth about race and slavery since before the nation’s birth. Teachers, parents, clergy, coaches, neighbors, and employers have passed down harmful habits of word and deed to younger generations. Those inherited patterns are part of what makes racism a systemic condition rather than an individual shortcoming.

After a White supremacist massacred nine Black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 hoping to trigger a race war, a white man named Garry Civitello called in to a national TV show and asked, “How can I be less racist?” Heather McGhee, a Black scholar on the show, praised Civitello for his desire to change. She suggested that he get to know some Black people and read some Black history. Civitello ended up not voting for Trump in 2016, even though nearly all the white people around him in rural North Carolina did. In a comment countless Americans might echo if they read the history books McGhee had recommended to him, Civitello marveled that, “There are so many things I did not know that I thought I knew.”

Deborah Cotton eventually succumbed to her wounds—she died four years after the shooting—but she lost her faith in truth and reconciliation.  After recovering her health sufficiently to work part-time, she took a job with the Alliance for Safety and Justice, a nonprofit that worked to reform the criminal justice system, including the mass incarceration of people of color. Shortly after Trump was elected in 2016, Cotton was invited to address a conference of government officials and legal experts in Louisiana’s state capital. The first speaker was an older white woman who had lost her son to gun violence. The woman argued forcefully against reforming current practices, insisting that her son’s killers never be allowed back on the streets.

“Then I got up,” Cotton later told me, “and I said that the young men who shot me and the other people on Mother’s Day should be punished, but I didn’t think they should spend the rest of their lives in prison. I said I thought those young men could redeem themselves and make a positive contribution to society if we would consider alternatives to life in prison. After the panel was over, a long line of people came up and wanted to talk with me, take my card, have me come speak to their organization, and whatnot. That felt so good. My statement and presence sent a very different message than people usually hear from victims of crime.”

Driving home afterwards, Cotton found herself actually feeling grateful that she’d been shot. “During the first year after the shooting,” she told me, “I often felt like I didn’t want to live anymore. I wasn’t going to take action myself, but many days I thought, ‘Just let me go.’ Now, I feel like if getting shot was what put me in the position to do this work, then I’m glad I was shot.”

“Wait—are you serious?” I asked. “Glad you got shot? I’m glad you survived, but I’m sure as hell not glad you were shot.”

“Yeah, I’m serious,” Cotton replied. “That’s just how I feel.”

Excerpted from Big Red's Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton and a Story of Race in America by Mark Hertsgaard. Published by Pegasus Books, May 7 th 2024

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1312 words essay on Equality in democracy

In the Declaration of Rights of Man (1789) issued by the National Assembly of France during the French Revolution, the follow­ing statement was made, “Men are born and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights.

” A similar statement is found in the American Declaration of Independence (1776): “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” It will be observed that natural equality of man has been emphasized in these statements as a self- evident truth.

The most striking fact about human life is inequality of human beings in bodily proportion, physical strength, mental ability, color, so on and so forth. Inequalities are inescapable. The statement that all men are equal is then as erroneous as that the surface of the earth is level.

There is, therefore, a good deal of controversy as to what equality means and whether it is possible to attain equality in a free society.

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Lord Acton, for instance, regards equality as opposed to liberty on the ground that since men are endowed with unequal capacities and powers, freedom of action would enable those with better talents to make better use of their opportunities and rise higher than the rest. This statement betrays his misunderstanding regarding equality and liberty.

In the opinion of Lord Acton liberty means laissez faire i.e., let the individual be alone. But the doctrine of laissez faire is not all comprehensive. In a modern class- divided society it cannot work without harming the interests of a vast majority of the masses.

Equality, however, does not imply that there should be no difference between man and man on grounds of mental equipment or physical capacity. It does not mean that all should be drilled to a dead level of uniformity. Equality simply means equality of opportunities.

It lies in the absence of special privileges. All barriers of birth, wealth, caste, creed and color should be removed. There should be no difference between man and man on the basis of these discriminations. According to Laski, all should be entitled to the enjoyment of all social and political privileges to which others are entitled.

The principle of equality is a protest against the present socio­economic system which allows certain privileged classes to enjoy oppor­tunities denied to the vast masses. According to Prof. Laski, it is an attempt to give each man as similar a chance as possible to utilize what Powers he may possess.

It also means the recognition of urgent needs in all, for instance, food, clothing, and shelter before there is a special recognition of non-urgent claims. Equality demands that before a few can be permitted to indulge in luxuries, the needs of all should be satisfied.

The idea of equality has, therefore, arisen out of the idea of privileges I which exist in a modern capitalist society.

Equality has many aspects—social, political, legal and economic.

Social Equality:

In the social sphere equality implies the removal; of all sorts of caste or class distinctions, which places some on higher level than the other. All men are born equal and all differences among them should be capable of explanation in terms of social welfare.

It is to be noted that social equality is simply conspicuous by its absence in India j because people believe in caste system which is a negation of social equality.

Efforts have been made by social reformers like Swami Daya Nand, Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Mahatma Gandhi to create an atmos­phere of social equality in India. It is in this spirit that the Constitution of India has abolished untouchability by law in order to ensure social equality.

Political Equality :

Political equality means that all citizens* should have equal political right and privileges. It is guaranteed through universal adult franchise, the right to be elected to all representative offices, right to hold any office under the State provided necessary qualifications are fulfilled, the right to form associations, the right to express opinion, freedom of Press, so on and so forth.

Legal Equality:

Legal equality envisages the equality of all before the law. The rich and the poor, the high and low should all be treated alike. No distinction should be made between man and man on the basis of social status, religious faith or political opinion. There should be government of laws as opposed to the government of kings and dictators. The ‘Rule of law’ is practiced in Great Britain and many other countries of the world. It is also the charter of our constitution.

Economic Equality:

Economic equality involves a certain leveling of incomes and removal of gross inequalities of wealth. It doe! not mean that all should have the same income. It simply insists upon the acquisition of a certain minimum standards of income by all before any one can be allowed to have more than this minimum.

No one should have the right to luxuries of life until the essential needs of others arc satisfied. In the words of Laski, “I have no right to take cakes when my neighbor is compelled to go without bread.” Economic equality does not seek to bring about the identity of incomes; it simply implies that there must If sufficiency for all before there can be superfluous with others.

Economic equality has been interpreted by some writers like Bryce in a literal sense as, “the attempt to expunge all differences in wealth, allotting to every man and woman an equal share in worldly goods.” But equality in the correct sense is not equal distribution of wealth.

The concept of equality emphasizes not an equal distribution of wealth but an equitable distribution of wealth. It needs reorganization of capitalist society on the basis of the socialist principle. “From each according to one’s capacity, to each according to the quantity and quality of work put in”.

Economic equality is the bed rock of real and effective democracy. Social, political and legal equality will automatically be created in a society which is based on economic equality.

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Brown v. Board of Education: 70 Years of Progress and Challenges

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After 70 years, what is left to say about Brown v. Board of Education ?

A lot, it turns out. As the anniversary nears this week for the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic May 17, 1954, decision that outlawed racial segregation in public schools, there are new books, reports, and academic conferences analyzing its impact and legacy.

Just last year, members of the current Supreme Court debated divergent interpretations of Brown as they weighed the use of race in higher education admissions, with numerous references to the landmark ruling in their deeply divided opinions in the case that ended college affirmative action as it had been practiced for half a century.

Meanwhile, some school district desegregation cases remain active after more than 50 years, while the Supreme Court has largely gotten out of the business of taking up the issue. There are fresh reports that the nation’s K-12 schools, which are much more racially and ethnically diverse than they were in the 1950s, are nonetheless experiencing resegregation .

At an April 4 conference at Columbia University, speakers captured the mood about a historic decision that slowly but steadily led to the desegregation of schools in much of the country but faced roadblocks and new conditions that have left its promise unfulfilled.

“I think Brown permeates nearly every aspect of our current modern society,” said Janai Nelson, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the organization led by Thurgood Marshall, who would later become a Supreme Court justice, during the Brown era.

“I hope that we see clearly now that there is an effort to roll back [the] gains” brought by the decision, said Nelson, whose organization was a conference co-sponsor. “There is an effort to recast Brown from what it was originally intended to produce. If we want to keep this multiracial democracy and actually have it fulfill its promise, because the status quo is still not satisfactory, we must look at the original intent of this all-important case and make sure we fulfill its promise.”

Celebrations at the White House, the Justice Department, and a Smithsonian Museum

On May 16, President Joe Biden will welcome to the White House descendants of the original plaintiffs in the cases that were consolidated into Brown , which dealt with cases from Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, and Virginia. (The companion decision, Bolling v. Sharpe , decided the same day, struck down school segregation in the District of Columbia.) On May 17, the president will deliver remarks on the historic decision at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona marked the anniversary at an event at the U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday.

“ Brown vs. Board and its legacy remind us who we want to be as a nation, a place that upholds values of justice and equity as its highest ideals,” Cardona said. “We normalize a culture of low expectations for some students and give them inadequate resources and support. Today, it’s still become all too normal for some to deny racism and segregation or ban books that teach Black history when we all know that Black history is American history.”

On May 17, 1954, then-Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the decision for a unanimous court that held that “in the field of public education, ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

That opinion was a compromise meant to bring about unanimity, and the court did not even address a desegregation remedy until a year later in Brown II , when it called for lower courts to address local conditions “with all deliberate speed.”

“In short, the standard the court established for evaluating schools’ desegregation efforts was as vague as the schedule for achieving it was amorphous,” R. Shep Melnick, a professor of American politics at Boston College and the co-chair of the Harvard Program on Constitutional Government, says in an assessment of the Brown anniversary published this month by the American Enterprise Institute.

The paper distills a book by Melnick published last year, The Crucible of Desegregation: The Uncertain Search for Educational Equity , which takes a fresh look at the 70-year history of post-Brown desegregation efforts.

Melnick argues that even after 70 years, Brown and later Supreme Court decisions remain full of ambiguities as to even what it means for a school system to be desegregated. He highlights two competing interpretations of Brown embraced by lawyers, judges, and scholars—a “colorblind” approach prohibiting any categorization of students by race, and a perspective based on racial isolation and equal educational opportunity. “Neither was ever fully endorsed or rejected by the Supreme Court,” Melnick writes in the book. “Both could find some support in the court’s ambiguous 1954 opinion.”

The Supreme Court issued some 35 decisions on desegregation after Brown , but hasn’t taken up a case involving a court-ordered desegregation remedy since 1995 and last spoke on the issue of integration and student diversity in the K-12 context in 2007, when the court struck down two voluntary plans to increase diversity by considering race in assigning students to schools.

Citations to Brown pervade last year’s sharply divided opinions over affirmative action

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., in his plurality opinion in that voluntary integration case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District , laid the groundwork for last year’s affirmative action decision, which fully embraced Brown’s “race-blind” interpretation.

Last term, the high court ruled that race-conscious admissions plans at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. (The vote was 6-2 in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College , with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson not participating because of her recent membership on a Harvard governing board. The vote was 6-3 in SFFA v. University of North Carolina .)

The Brown decision was a running theme in the arguments in the case, and in the some 230 pages of opinions.

Roberts, in the majority opinion, said a fundamental lesson of Brown in 1954 and Brown II in 1955 was that “The time for making distinctions based on race had passed.”

Brown and a generation of high court decisions on race that followed, in education and other areas, “reflect the core purpose of the Equal Protection Clause: doing away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race,” the chief justice wrote.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who succeeded Thurgood Marshall, joined the majority opinion and wrote a lengthy concurrence that touched on views he had long expressed about the 1954 decision. He cited the language of legal briefs filed by the challengers of segregated schools in the Brown cases (led by Marshall) that embraced the view that the 14th Amendment barred all government consideration of race.

Thomas said those challenging segregated schools in Brown “embraced the equality principle.”

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh also joined the majority and acknowledged in his concurrence that in Brown , the court “authorized race-based student assignments for several decades—but not indefinitely into the future.”

(The other justices in the majority were Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett.)

Writing the main dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor rejected the view that Brown was race-blind.

“ Brown was a race-conscious decision that emphasized the importance of education in our society,” she wrote, joined by justices Elena Kagan and Jackson. “The desegregation cases that followed Brown confirm that the ultimate goal of that seminal decision was to achieve a system of integrated schools that ensured racial equality of opportunity, not to impose a formalistic rule of race-blindness.”

Jackson, in a separate dissent (joined by Sotomayor and Kagan), said, “The majority and concurring opinions rehearse this court’s idealistic vision of racial equality, from Brown forward, with appropriate lament for past indiscretions. But the race-linked gaps that the law (aided by this court) previously founded and fostered—which indisputably define our present reality— are strangely absent and do not seem to matter.”

Amid reports on resegregation, some legal efforts continue

As the Brown anniversary arrives, there are fresh reports about resegregation of the schools. Research released this month by Sean Reardon of Stanford University and Ann Owens of the University of Southern California found that students in the nation’s large school districts have become much more isolated racially and economically in recent years.

The Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, which has been sounding the alarm about resegregation for years, says in a new report that Black and Latino students were the most highly segregated demographic groups in 2021. Though U.S. schools were 45 percent white, Blacks, on average, attended 76 percent nonwhite schools, and Latino students went to 75 percent nonwhite schools.

The CRP says the Brown anniversary is worth celebrating, but “American schools have been moving away from the goal of Brown and creating more ‘inherently unequal’ schools for a third of a century. We need new thought about how inequality and integration work in institutions and communities with changing multiracial populations with very unequal experiences.”

At the Columbia conference, Samuel Spital, the litigation director and general counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, noted that many jurisdictions are still under desegregation orders, some going back decades.

He highlighted one where LDF lawyers have been in federal district court, involving the 7,200-student St. Martin Parish school district in western Louisiana. Black plaintiffs first sued over segregated schools in 1965. In a 2022 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, in New Orleans, noted that the case had been pending for “five decades,” though largely inactive for long stretches. The court nonetheless affirmed the district court’s continued supervision of a desegregation plan that addressed disparities in graduation tracks and student discipline, though it said the court overstepped in ordering the closure of an elementary school in a mostly white community.

As recently as this month, the LDF and the Department of Justice’s civil rights division joined with the St. Martin Parish school board in a proposed consent order for revised attendance zones for the district’s schools. The proposed order suggests that court supervision of student assignments could end sometime after June 2027.

“We try to make sure that with the vast docket of segregation cases we have, that we have not lost sight of what Brown’s ultimate intent was,” said LDF’s Nelson, which was not just “to make sure that Black and white children learn together” but also to foster principles of equity and citizenship.

With a hostile federal court climate, advocates more recently have turned to state constitutions and state courts to pursue desegregation. Last year, a state judge in New Jersey allowed key claims to proceed in a lawsuit that seeks to hold the state responsible for remedying racial segregation in its many “racially isolated” public schools. In December, the Minnesota Supreme Court allowed a suit under the state constitution to move forward, ruling that there was no need for plaintiffs to prove that the state itself had caused segregation in its schools.

“We see a path forward through state courts with the very specific goal of trying to challenge state practices, which really boil down to segregative school district lines,” Saba Bireda, the chief legal counsel of Brown’s Promise , said at the Columbia conference. Bireda, a former civil rights lawyer in the Education Department under President Barack Obama’s administration, co-founded the Washington-based organization last year to help address diversity and underfunding in public schools.

A Supreme Court exhibit offers the idealized take on Brown

At the Supreme Court, there has been no formal recognition of the 70th anniversary of Brown . But the court did open an exhibit on its ground floor late last year that tells the story of some of the first desegregation cases, including Brown .

The exhibit is primarily about the Little Rock integration crisis of 1957, when Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus defied a federal judge’s order to desegregate Central High School. The exhibit is built around the actual bench used by Judge Ronald N. Davies when he heard a challenge to Faubus’ use of the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the nine Black high school students from entering the all-white high school that year. (Davies withstood threats and intense opposition from desegregation opponents, but he ruled for the Black students. The Supreme Court itself supported desegregation in Little Rock with its 1958 decision in Cooper v. Aaron .)

To tell the Little Rock story, the exhibit starts with Brown (and some of the prior history). A central feature is a 15-minute video featuring all current members of the court.

In the video, the justices set aside their differences over the meaning of Brown and provide a more idealized perspective on the 1954 decision.

“ Brown was a godsend,” Thomas says in the video. “Because it said that what was happening that we thought was wrong, they now know that this court said it was also wrong. It’s wrong not just morally, but under the Constitution of the United States. It was like a ray of hope.”

Kavanaugh says: “ Brown vs. Board of Education is the single greatest moment, single greatest decision in this court’s history. And the reason for that is that it enforced a constitutional principle, equal protection of the laws, equal justice under law. It made that real for all Americans. And it corrected a grave wrong, the separate but equal doctrine that the court had previously allowed.”

Jackson, the court’s third Black justice, who has spoken of her family moving in one generation from “segregation to the Supreme Court,” reflects in the video on Brown ‘s legacy.

“I think I’m most grateful for the fact that my parents have lived to see me in this position, after a history of them and others in our family and people from my background not having the opportunity to live to our fullest potential,” she says.

As the video comes to a close, Roberts speaks with evident pride in his voice.

“The Supreme Court building stands as a symbol of our country’s faith in the rule of law,” the chief justice says. “ Brown v. Board of Education , the great school desegregation case, was decided here.”

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Guest Essay

The Deep, Tangled Roots of American Illiberalism

By Steven Hahn

Dr. Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at New York University and the author, most recently, of “Illiberal America: a History.”

In a recent interview with Time, Donald Trump promised a second term of authoritarian power grabs, administrative cronyism, mass deportations of the undocumented, harassment of women over abortion, trade wars and vengeance brought upon his rivals and enemies, including President Biden. “If they said that a president doesn’t get immunity,” Mr. Trump told Time, “then Biden, I am sure, will be prosecuted for all of his crimes.”

Further evidence, it seems, of Mr. Trump’s efforts to construct a political world like no other in American history. But how unprecedented is it, really? That Mr. Trump continues to lead in polls should make plain that he and his MAGA movement are more than noxious weeds in otherwise liberal democratic soil.

Many of us have not wanted to see it that way. “This is not who we are as a nation,” one journalist exclaimed in what was a common response to the violence on Jan. 6, “and we must not let ourselves or others believe otherwise.” Mr. Biden has said much the same thing.

While it’s true that Mr. Trump was the first president to lose an election and attempt to stay in power, observers have come to recognize the need for a lengthier view of Trumpism. Even so, they are prone to imagining that there was a time not all that long ago when political “normalcy” prevailed. What they have failed to grasp is that American illiberalism is deeply rooted in our past and fed by practices, relationships and sensibilities that have been close to the surface, even when they haven’t exploded into view.

Illiberalism is generally seen as a backlash against modern liberal and progressive ideas and policies, especially those meant to protect the rights and advance the aspirations of groups long pushed to the margins of American political life. But in the United States, illiberalism is better understood as coherent sets of ideas that are related but also change over time.

This illiberalism celebrates hierarchies of gender, race and nationality; cultural homogeneity; Christian religious faith; the marking of internal as well as external enemies; patriarchal families; heterosexuality; the will of the community over the rule of law; and the use of political violence to achieve or maintain power. This illiberalism sank roots from the time of European settlement and spread out from villages and towns to the highest levels of government. In one form or another, it has shaped much of our history. Illiberalism has frequently been a stalking horse, if not in the winner’s circle. Hardly ever has it been roundly defeated.

A few examples may be illustrative. Although European colonization of North America has often been imagined as a sharp break from the ways of home countries, neo-feudal dreams inspired the making of Euro-American societies from the Carolinas up through the Hudson Valley, based as they were on landed estates and coerced labor, while the Puritan towns of New England, with their own hierarchies, demanded submission to the faith and harshly policed their members and potential intruders alike. The backcountry began to fill up with land-hungry settlers who generally formed ethnicity-based enclaves, eyed outsiders with suspicion and, with rare exceptions, hoped to rid their territory of Native peoples. Most of those who arrived in North America between the early 17th century and the time of the American Revolution were either enslaved or in servitude, and master-servant jurisprudence shaped labor relations well after slavery was abolished, a phenomenon that has been described as “belated feudalism.”

The anti-colonialism of the American Revolution was accompanied not only by warfare against Native peoples and rewards for enslavers, but also by a deeply ingrained anti-Catholicism, and hostility to Catholics remained a potent political force well into the 20th century. Monarchist solutions were bruited about during the writing of the Constitution and the first decade of the American Republic: John Adams thought that the country would move in such a direction and other leaders at the time, including Washington, Madison and Hamilton, wondered privately if a king would be necessary in the event a “republican remedy” failed.

The 1830s, commonly seen as the height of Jacksonian democracy, were racked by violent expulsions of Catholics , Mormons and abolitionists of both races, along with thousands of Native peoples dispossessed of their homelands and sent to “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi.

The new democratic politics of the time was often marked by Election Day violence after campaigns suffused with military cadences, while elected officials usually required the support of elite patrons to guarantee the bonds they had to post. Even in state legislatures and Congress, weapons could be brandished and duels arranged; “bullies” enforced the wills of their allies.

When enslavers in the Southern states resorted to secession rather than risk their system under a Lincoln administration, they made clear that their Confederacy was built on the cornerstone of slavery and white supremacy. And although their crushing defeat brought abolition, the establishment of birthright citizenship (except for Native peoples), the political exclusion of Confederates, and the extension of voting rights to Black men — the results of one of the world’s great revolutions — it was not long before the revolution went into reverse.

The federal government soon allowed former Confederates and their white supporters to return to power, destroy Black political activism and, accompanied by lynchings (expressing the “will” of white communities), build the edifice of Jim Crow: segregation, political disfranchisement and a harsh labor regime. Already previewed in the pre-Civil War North, Jim Crow received the imprimatur of the Supreme Court and the administration of Woodrow Wilson .

Few Progressives of the early 20th century had much trouble with this. Segregation seemed a modern way to choreograph “race relations,” and disfranchisement resonated with their disenchantment with popular politics, whether it was powered by Black voters in the South or European immigrants in the North. Many Progressives were devotees of eugenics and other forms of social engineering, and they generally favored overseas imperialism; some began to envision the scaffolding of a corporate state — all anticipating the dark turns in Europe over the next decades.

The 1920s, in fact, saw fascist pulses coming from a number of directions in the United States and, as in Europe, targeting political radicals. Benito Mussolini won accolades in many American quarters. The lab where Josef Mengele worked received support from the Rockefeller Foundation. White Protestant fundamentalism reigned in towns and the countryside. And the Immigration Act of 1924 set limits on the number of newcomers, especially those from Southern and Eastern Europe, who were thought to be politically and culturally unassimilable.

Most worrisome, the Ku Klux Klan, energized by anti-Catholicism and antisemitism as well as anti-Black racism, marched brazenly in cities great and small. The Klan became a mass movement and wielded significant political power; it was crucial, for example , to the enforcement of Prohibition. Once the organization unraveled in the late 1920s, many Klansmen and women found their way to new fascist groups and the radical right more generally.

Sidelined by the Great Depression and New Deal, the illiberal right regained traction in the late 1930s, and during the 1950s won grass-roots support through vehement anti-Communism and opposition to the civil rights movement. As early as 1964, in a run for the Democratic presidential nomination, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama began to hone a rhetoric of white grievance and racial hostility that had appeal in the Midwest and Middle Atlantic, and Barry Goldwater’s campaign that year, despite its failure, put winds in the sails of the John Birch Society and Young Americans for Freedom.

Four years later, Wallace mobilized enough support as a third-party candidate to win five states. And in 1972, once again as a Democrat, Wallace racked up primary wins in both the North and the South before an assassination attempt forced him out of the race. Growing backlashes against school desegregation and feminism added further fuel to the fire on the right, paving the way for the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s.

By the early 1990s, the neo-Nazi and Klansman David Duke had won a seat in the Louisiana Legislature and nearly three-fifths of the white vote in campaigns for governor and senator. Pat Buchanan, seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 1992, called for “America First,” the fortification of the border (a “Buchanan fence”), and a culture war for the “soul” of America, while the National Rifle Association became a powerful force on the right and in the Republican Party.

When Mr. Trump questioned Barack Obama’s legitimacy to serve as president, a project that quickly became known as “birtherism,” he made use of a Reconstruction-era racist trope that rejected the legitimacy of Black political rights and power. In so doing, Mr. Trump began to cement a coalition of aggrieved white voters. They were ready to push back against the nation’s growing cultural diversity — embodied by Mr. Obama — and the challenges they saw to traditional hierarchies of family, gender and race. They had much on which to build.

Back in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, in “Democracy in America,” glimpsed the illiberal currents that already entangled the country’s politics. While he marveled at the “equality of conditions,” the fluidity of social life and the strength of republican institutions, he also worried about the “omnipotence of the majority.”

“What I find most repulsive in America is not the extreme freedom reigning there,” Tocqueville wrote, “but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny.” He pointed to communities “taking justice into their own hands,” and warned that “associations of plain citizens can compose very rich, influential, and powerful bodies, in other words, aristocratic bodies.” Lamenting their intellectual conformity, Tocqueville believed that if Americans ever gave up republican government, “they will pass rapidly on to despotism,” restricting “the sphere of political rights, taking some of them away in order to entrust them to a single man.”

The slide toward despotism that Tocqueville feared may be well underway, whatever the election’s outcome. Even if they try to fool themselves into thinking that Mr. Trump won’t follow through, millions of voters seem ready to entrust their rights to “a single man” who has announced his intent to use autocratic powers for retribution, repression, expulsion and misogyny.

Only by recognizing what we’re up against can we mount an effective campaign to protect our democracy, leaning on the important political struggles — abolitionism, antimonopoly, social democracy, human rights, civil rights, feminism — that have challenged illiberalism in the past and offer the vision and political pathways to guide us in the future.

Our biggest mistake would be to believe that we’re watching an exceptional departure in the country’s history. Because from the first, Mr. Trump has tapped into deep and ever-expanding illiberal roots. Illiberalism’s history is America’s history.

Steven Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at New York University and the author, most recently, of “ Illiberal America: a History .”

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