The invention of modern equality

Abstract

Extract

Equality is an abstract, discursive concept: people are not equal but they can regard, and sometimes treat, each other as equals; that is to say, they can be represented as equal. Equality, however, is a far from self-evident concept. Throughout recorded history inequality rather than equality was the overwhelming, ‘obvious’ reality, the very stuff of social relations, while equality had to be invented, asserted, imagined. It is surely no accident that the champions of equality have so often been dismissed as ‘utopian’ daydreamers while the defenders of inequality were usually able to don the comfortable mantle of ‘realism’.