Equality

Mala Konda Reddy CH

Introduction:
In the modern period the equality of all human beings has been used as a
rallying slogan in the struggles against states and social institutions which
uphold inequalities of rank, wealth status or privilege, among people.
In the eighteenth century, the French revolutionaries used the slogan
‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ to revolt against the landed feudal
aristocracy and the monarchy.
The demand for equality was also raised during anti-colonial liberation
struggles in Asia and Africa during the twentieth century.

It continues to be raised by struggling groups such as women or Dalits, who feel

marginalised in our society.

Today, equality is a widely accepted ideal which is embodied in the

constitutions and laws of many countries.
Yet, it is inequality rather than equality which is most visible around us in
the world as well as within our own society.

Thus, we face a paradox: almost everyone accepts the ideal of equality, yet
almost everywhere we encounter inequality.
We live in a complex world of unequal wealth, opportunities, work situations,
and power.

Thus, Equality is one of the central themes of social and political theory.

Among the billions of human beings in this world, innumerable inequalities

abound.
People are different and unequal in many respects.
They belong to different races, religions, sexes, and so on.
Their physical, genetic and mental endowments are also dissimilar.
People differ with regard to their dispositions and abilities and the ways in
which they lead, and are taught to lead, their lives.
The range of inequalities and disparities that humanity displays are indeed very
wide and this is an empirical fact.

Yet, as humans, we believe, and rightly so, that we are essentially equal and
possess equal worth especially when it comes to realizing this ideal in social,
economic and political structures of our society.

We invoke the concept of equality when we want to be counted as an equal, to

be treated—and aspiring or claiming to be treated—as an equal, to be equally
entitled to social goods.

But what does it mean to be treated as an equal?

We are clearly here not referring to anatomical similarities, save the difference
between men and women, and the common facts of our social existence that we,
as humans, possess: to wit, the use of language, ability to reproduce, living in
societies, and so on. But we are alike in more fundamental respects.

Along with other political values such as justice or liberty, equality offers us a
moral framework that we draw upon to make political judgements, and explain,
prescribe or criticize certain political views and forms of political action.

The concept of equality lies at the heart of normative political theory.

In a very general sense, equality is a relationship between two or more persons
or groups regarding some aspect of their lives. The idea of equality is not,
however, a simple one and hence it is not always easy to speak with accuracy
what that relationship ought to be and in respect of what.
EVOLUTION OF THE CONCEPT:
Starting from the ancient Greek civilization till the 20th century, notable for its
many egalitarian experiments, the idea of equality has evoked some of the
strongest human passions.
The content of the concept has undergone momentous transformations across
centuries shaping, and being shaped by, the millions of people that have been
inspired to fight various political battles sometimes against an autocrat, at other
times against unjust social conditions, and on other occasions against
undemocratic regimes or policies.

In what follows, we will selectively use some thinkers (Aristotle, Hobbes,

Rousseau, Marx, and Tocqueville) who had decisive roles in giving shape to the
idea of equality.
If we consider the fact that the idea of equality also derives its strengths from
similar normative concepts, we may well find other chapters in this book
complementing the present exercise.
Aristotle:
In what by now are well-known facts of the Greek experiments in popular rule,
we are well aware of how citizens exercised an equal voice in the governance of
their city-states.
Practices of equality established by law were a sine qua non of democratic rule.
A word that competed in common usage with demokratia in ancient Athens was
isonomia, meaning equality before and within the law, a form of political
equality that secured the equal participation of ‘the many’ who were poor in the
regime.
Yet, ancient Athens also had other classes of people who were excluded from
the domain of citizenship: metics (foreigners), slaves and women. Aristotle’s
Politics, both documents and justifies this exclusion.
Aristotle’s conception of equality, it is evident, was limited to the class of
citizens only.
The political equality of citizens lay in acknowledging the virtue of ‘ruling and
being ruled in turn.’
In Book III, Chapter 9 of Politics, Aristotle draws a straightforward correlation
between justice and equality when he says that ‘justice is held to be equality,
and it is, but for equals and not for all; and inequality is held to be just and is
indeed, but for unequal’s and not for all’. This is the first classic statement of
formal equality, reiterating the dominant conception of legal equality of treating
like cases alike, and unlike cases unlike. However, unlike other conceptions of
formal equality which are generally shorn of substance, this conception captures
Aristotle’s defence of natural inequality among men to rule. Note that in
Aristotle’s view, nature, which does nothing in vain, divides people into the
ruling and the ruled, where, to belong to the ruling category one must have
rational, deliberative and authoritative capacities (true for some men, but not
all). This inequality between the ruling and the ruled—the unequal’s—is just.

Hobbes:
If Aristotle defends natural inequality and then proposes a corresponding
political equality between some humans (usually male citizens), Hobbes, who
quarrels with Aristotle the most, defends a view of the natural equality between
all humans in the state of nature.
In Leviathan, his most famous work, Hobbes claims that nature has made men
so equal, in the faculties of body, and mind; so that though there be found one
man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another;
yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not
so considerable, as that one man can there upon claim to himself any benefit, to
which another may not pretend, as well as he. (Hobbes 1968: 183)
As to the strength of the body, Hobbes proclaims that even the weakest has
enough strength to kill the strongest either by secret plot or by conspiring with
others.
In addition, as to the faculties of the mind, Hobbes argues that prudence, borne
out of experience, is equally bestowed upon men.
What Hobbes proposes is the equal ability of individuals in the state of nature
which gives rise to an equality of hope to achieve our ends.
What drives individuals is an equal ability to work as well as an equal and
irresistible passion for power.
In the Hobbesian vocation, it is important to acknowledge the achievement
of natural equality among men freed from all non-political sources of
authority, including the religious.
Rousseau on Inequality:
In his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality (also called the
Second Discourse), Rousseau speculates on human psychology and the history
of social institutions.
This is where he delves deep into the issue of human inequality, describing its
various types that exist among human beings and determining which kind of
inequality are ‘natural’ and which ones are ‘unnatural’.
Rousseau presents his analysis of society and the origins of inequality as a
historical narrative.
For Rousseau, man in his state of nature is essentially an animal like any
other, driven by two key motivating principles: pity and self-preservation.
The only thing that separates him from the beasts is some sense of unrealized
perfectibility. This notion of perfectibility is what allows human beings to
change with time, and according to Rousseau, it becomes important the moment
an isolated human being is forced to adapt to his environment and allows
himself to be shaped by it.

When natural disasters force people to move from one place to another, make
contact with other people, and form small groups or elementary societies, new
needs are created, and men begin to move out of the state of nature towards
something very different.
Rousseau writes that as individuals have more contact with one another and
small groups begin to form, the human mind develops language, which, in turn,
contributes to the development of reason.
Life in the collective state also precipitates the development of a new, negative
motivating principle for human actions. Rousseau calls this principle, amour
propre, and it drives men to compare themselves to others.
This drive towards comparison with others is not only rooted in the desire to
preserve the self and pity others, but it also drives men to seek domination over
their fellow human beings as a way of augmenting their own happiness.

Rousseau states that with the development of amour propre and more complex
human societies, private property is invented, and the labour necessary for
human survival is divided among different individuals to provide for the whole.
This division of labour and the beginning of private property allow the
property owners and all those who live off the labour of others to dominate and
exploit the poor.
Rousseau observes that the poor resent this state of affairs and will naturally
seek war against the rich to end their unfair domination.

In Rousseau’s history, when the rich recognize this, they deceive the poor into
joining a political society that claims to grant them the equality they seek.

The universal consent of humanity is needed to justify the institution of private

property. The rich suggest that everyone associate together to use their common
force to ‘secure the weak from oppression, restrain the ambitious, and secure for
everyone the possession of what belongs to him’.
The naïve and unsuspecting poor ‘ran to meet their chains thinking they secured
their freedom, for although they had enough reason to feel the advantages of a
political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its
dangers’.

Instead of granting equality, however, the rich sanctify their oppression and
make an unnatural moral inequality a permanent feature of civil society.

In the progress of inequality through the different epochs of civilization,

Rousseau notes how the changing nature of institutionalized inequality
transforms the dynamic of social relations.
If the right to property and the establishment of law was the first stage, it
authorized the status of rich and poor.
The institution of magistracy was the second stage and it established the
relations between the powerful and the weak. The last stage effected the
transformation of legitimate power into arbitrary power (which we just
discussed above) that authorized the existence of masters and slaves.

In Rousseau’s inequality-continuum, the property owners or the rich amass

power and become masters. For the poor the metamorphosis would follow:
poor→weak→slaves.
That is a powerful statement but is soon followed up by Rousseau’s claims that
when no more inequality is possible and things have been stretched to their
limits, ‘new revolutions dissolve the government altogether or bring it closer to
its legitimate institution’.
Rousseau’s argument in the Second Discourse is that the only natural inequality
among men is that which results from differences in physical strength, for this is
the only sort of inequality that exists in the state of nature.
As he explains, however, in modern societies the creation of laws and property
has corrupted natural men and created new forms of inequality that are not in
accordance with natural law. Rousseau calls these unjustifiable, unacceptable
forms of inequality. It is, in other words, moral inequality, and he concludes by
making clear that this sort of inequality must be contested.

Marx:
At one level, Marx’s views on equality can best be described as a critique of
liberal equality.
In his polemic against the prevalent socialist conception of equality, Marx
derided his contemporaries for their inability to account for the materialistic
conception of history. It was necessary for Marx to correct popular
misconceptions surrounding the ideal whose uses were more in the interest of
the bourgeois.
In, The German Ideology, Marx seeks to unravel the ideological bind that
certain concepts have in a historical period. A ruling class has its own ideology
to which society subscribes.
The parallel between Rousseau and Marx here is pretty evident. As Rousseau
laments how the poor get duped by the promises made by the rich to secure the
consent of the former to institute ‘legitimate’ power, Marx also shows how the
ruling class produces a legitimating ideology to perpetuate the system of
economic exploitation.
Towards that end, the division of labour in the ruling class of a capitalist society
will ensure a division between mental and material labour, and correspondingly
the division between the ‘the thinkers of the class’ and the capital owners will
emerge.
What Marx envisions for the final stage of history—the communist, classless
society— becomes clear only when we understand the impossibility of human
emancipation under conditions of exploitative social relations.
The question of human emancipation is linked to freedom from economic
inequalities.
The capitalist system intensifies and heightens economic inequality.
In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, however, Marx declares that in the
final phase of communism, society would be able to inscribe on its banner:
‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’

Tocqueville:
The central thrust of Tocqueville’s work was to study equality as a tendency of
modern history.

His study of the American democratic revolution was designed to understand

the historical transition from feudalism to democracy in the Western society as a
whole.

His study was not meant to just identify the transition, but to account for it as
well. Why was the triumph of equality inevitable? The project involved
explaining the gradual and progressive development of social equality.

Equality as an ideal, appeals to people who wish to escape conditions of

servitude and dependence. It makes democratic life possible.

In comparing aristocracy with democracy, Tocqueville notes: ‘Aristocracy links

everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain. Democracy breaks the
chain and frees each link’

In democracies, men prefer equality to liberty, and hold on to it tenaciously.

‘The charms of equality are felt the whole time and are within the reach of all;
the noblest spirits appreciate them, and the commonest minds exult in them. The
passion generated by equality is therefore both strong and general’ (Tocqueville
1969: 505).
However, Tocqueville warns us of the dangers of excessive equality.
There are times when the passions for equality may turn into a delirium.
Tocqueville is equivocal about the consequences of social equality on political
life. Although passions for equality may be found to exist very strongly in
democracies, it is vital, in his view that a single-minded pursuit of equality at
the expense of liberty may prove detrimental to the political health of
democracies.