Historical ideas of equality help us imagine an equal world

It’s no accident that equality comes first among the ‘self-evident’ truths articulated in the United States Declaration of Independence. The claim that ‘all men are created equal’ serves there not simply as an abstract premise from which revolutionary consequences ought to follow, but as a concrete practical foundation on which the American colonists could claim to stand as equals with the greatest king and hold him to account. Still impressed by his own handiwork 50 years later, Thomas Jefferson even prophesied that the ‘palpable truth’ of equality enshrined in the Declaration would one day unite all of humankind.

Yet today, it’s evident that the word ‘equality’ means very different things to different people. What once seemed capable of providing common ground is now just another source of controversy. What explains this shift? I suspect that the deceptively simple, conceptual language of ‘equality’ has itself played a substantial role. A better understanding of ‘equality talk’ – as the application of this language to human beings and their relations – might therefore shed some light on our predicament.

Let’s begin by examining a group of people that generally prides itself on thinking (and speaking) more clearly than most: professional philosophers. What are they doing when they talk about equality?

Often, they’re saying something about human beings: about what we’re fundamentally like, and how we should be treated morally, politically and socially. When an academic philosopher says that ‘all people are equal’, she’s generally saying that, despite differences of race and gender, economic class or individual merit, every person is somehow the same in some fundamental respect(s). While some philosophers will stress the human capacity for reason and moral agency, others emphasise our mutual vulnerability to suffering and violent death. Still, all generally agree that this sameness – whatever its underlying basis – ought to matter for our social and political arrangements, such that any persistent inequalities between human beings must require some justification or redress.

But here, a non-philosopher might wonder why the professionals insist on using the technical language of ‘equality’ as opposed to something more straightforward like ‘sameness’? One reason, I think, is that they are trading on the former concept’s mathematical resonances of quantitative precision and transcendent truth. Those resonances, in turn, make the problem of inequality seem relatively tractable – as something the existence of which can be measured, hence agreed upon. While other political values, like liberty, resist reduction to a common measure, the quantitative logic of equality thus promises an objective standard against which social progress can be judged.

The distinctly mathematical aspect of modern ‘equality talk’ isn’t new. Consider the Declaration’s language of ‘self-evidence’. This was an allusion to Euclid’s Elements (c300 BCE), in which the transitive property of equality – ‘things that are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another’ – comes first among the so-called axiomata, or ‘worthy notions’. The truth of these geometric propositions could, in turn, be accepted without proof, and so serve as a shared starting point from which to reason to less-obvious conclusions.

If like cases are to be treated alike as a matter of logic, then ‘equals’ ought to be treated ‘equally’ as a matter of politics

Two hundred years after the Declaration, we likewise find the philosopher Ronald Dworkin in Taking Rights Seriously (1977) describing the right of all persons to equality as ‘axiomatic’, and thereby taking the basic equality of human beings off the table as a topic of political controversy. Let metaphysicians and theologians quarrel about its basis, then, or whether nonhuman animals or artificial intelligence ought to count equally as moral persons. Political philosophers could get on with the altogether more important business of determining what this equality implied for our social, political and economic relations. Much like Jefferson, Dworkin would also later lend his axiom world-historical significance, as providing ‘a kind of plateau in political argument’ characteristic of modernity. By this, Dworkin meant that most contemporary political ideologies – from liberalism to utilitarianism, and libertarianism to communism – must begin from a shared premise, that all ‘members of the community matter, and matter equally’. And so, whatever their differences, political opponents ought to recognise themselves as building upon a common foundation.

Today, Dworkin’s historical optimism about equality as a universal premise seems harder to sustain. Nevertheless, his ‘egalitarian plateau’ image remains popular among academic philosophers, for whom basic equality has come to mark an indelible ‘divide in moral thinking between (1) a premodern world in which nobles [were] regarded as having greater worth than peasants … and (2) a modern world that repudiates these crude prejudices.’ Moreover, if like cases are to be treated alike as a matter of logic, then surely ‘equals’ ought to be treated ‘equally’ as a matter of politics, too – for instance, by distributing to each the same amount of welfare, rights or resources. Dworkin’s Oxford colleague, the analytic Marxist G A Cohen, could thus simply ‘take for granted that there is something which justice requires people to have equal amounts of.’ The only question remaining was that posed by Amartya Sen: ‘Equality of what?’ (My emphasis.)

And yet, the idea that unequal treatment might sometimes be required to respect a person’s basic equality was also intuitive to many late-20th-century liberals, who supported policies like affirmative action. Dworkin himself framed this intuition influentially in terms of a distinction between treating people ‘equally’ – by applying the same standards or distributing the same amount to everyone – and treating them ‘as equals’, in a way responsive to their differences. This insight may, at first, sound similar to the much older, Marxist principle, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ But as the historian Darrin McMahon observed in Equality (2023), Marx and Engels were themselves consistently critical of equality, dismissing it as a just another ‘popular prejudice’ to be dispelled by the coming communist revolution.

In any case, it is Dworkin’s distinction, not Marx’s, that has since become central to contemporary theories of social or ‘relational’ egalitarianism, especially those associated with the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson. On this view, the point of equality is not to ensure a quantitatively identical distribution of stuff, whether of rights or resources, but rather the realisation of a just society in which every person can stand as an equal, without any hierarchical relations of inferiority or superiority. But the devil, as ever, is in the details, with relational egalitarians saying surprisingly little in positive terms about what relating as ‘equals’ actually looks like – and, specifically, when and what forms of unequal treatment might be involved.

One encounters a similar difficulty in recent debates pitting ‘equity’ against ‘equality’ as an approach to social justice. Proponents of the former insist that, unlike the latter, equity rejects a one-size-fits-all approach by taking certain differences – for instance, of race, disability or socioeconomic circumstances – into account. When pressed, however, equity’s defenders also tend to define ‘equitable’ treatment in strikingly Dworkinian terms, for instance as placing the disadvantaged on an ‘equal footing’ with the privileged. The result has been an odd convergence between equity’s progressive proponents and their conservative critics, with each presenting their preferred approach as the truly egalitarian one, with one side insisting that equal standing requires unequal treatment, and the other that, in a society of equals, the same rules ought to apply equally to everyone.

No wonder, then, that equality talk can feel so disorienting! Even among philosophers, it consistently promises more than it delivers. For some, equality means that we are the same in all the ways that matter, hence the same standards must apply; for others, it means that we are all different in ways deserving of respect. Even Dworkin’s supposedly clarifying formula of treating people ‘as equals’ reduces, under scrutiny, to the suggestion that we ought to treat people unequally when it is appropriate to their particular circumstances. If this is all equality demands, a hereditary aristocrat would find little to disagree with.

Here, however, a historian like McMahon might reassure us that the meaning of equality has always been ‘elusive’. In French, for instance, to say ça m’est égal can mean ‘it’s all the same to me’, yes, but it can also mean that our differences don’t matter, they’re matters of indifference. The varieties of English ‘equality talk’ can be more confusing still. When it was first published more than 250 years ago, Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) offered no fewer than eight definitions for the adjective ‘equal’, including ‘indifferent’, ‘like another in bulk, [or] excellence’, and ‘adequate to any purpose’.

Still, amid this multiplicity, one finds equality talk doing something distinctive in early modern English. Specifically, the adjective ‘equal’ – deriving originally from the Latin aequalis – consistently presented English speakers with a learned and socially elevated alternative to a more common Anglo-Saxon term, ‘alike’ (cognate with the German gleich). Whereas we today understand equality primarily in mathematical terms, however, to early modern English ears it meant something more like evenness, in the sense of being on a level or balanced, with neither side higher nor lower than the other.

Unlike sameness, equality was the absence of difference where one would normally expect to find it

Consider the 14th-century Wycliffe Bible, which presented St Paul’s counsels of charity to the Corinthians as follows: ‘but of evenness [aequalitas] in the present time your abundance fulfil the need of them, that also the abundance of them be a fulfilling of your need, that evenness be made.’ Rich and poor were thus to be made ‘equal’ in this passage not by possessing identical amounts of wealth at any given moment, but by counter-balancing their holdings over time through reciprocal giving. One person’s abundance must meet another’s need in expectation of a future reversal. Here, the historical sense of equality-as-evenness clearly recalls the process of ‘levelling’ the scales or balances used by ancient merchants to weigh precious metals and trade goods in the marketplace. (Indeed, the English word ‘level’ derives originally from the Latin libra, meaning scale.)

If we turn directly to the ancient Hellenic world, we find the same practical association between the concept of equality and the activity of balancing. This association may explain, in turn, why Greek mathematicians like Euclid took so much trouble to distinguish the idea of ‘equality’ (isotes) from other conceptual relations like ‘sameness’ and ‘similarity’ in their works. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle also distinguished equality by defining it in exclusively negative terms: ‘The equal, then, is that which is neither great nor small, but would naturally be either great or small.’ In other words, there was something exceptional about equality. Unlike sameness, it was the absence of difference where one would normally expect to find it.

This definition can, I think, help us make better sense of Aristotle’s celebrated observation in the Politics, that ‘justice is a kind of equality’, as well as his assertion that there were at least two competing definitions of equality in play in contemporary politics. Elsewhere, he would define these as ‘arithmetic’ and ‘geometric’ equality, respectively: the former distributing numerically identical shares to the parties despite their differences, for instance of wealth or virtue, and the latter assigning different amounts to each in direct proportion with their differences. In the Politics, then, these two kinds of equality re-appear as competing strategies for balancing political power between citizens, specifically between the poor many and the rich few. While democrats favoured the former principle – claiming that every adult male citizen should be assigned strictly equal political weight, like coins of equal value – oligarchs insisted that citizens should be weighed instead, like metals in the marketplace, with political power then distributed to each in proportion with his unequal wealth or virtue. In ancient Greece, the election of political officeholders by their fellow citizens was thus regarded as an oligarchic procedure, in contrast with the properly democratic alternative of sortition, or selection by lot, which afforded each a strictly equal (random) chance of exercising power.

Notice, however, that, despite their differences, ancient democrats and oligarchs could alike embrace ‘equality’ as a political ideal without also committing to the view that every citizen, let alone every human being, must be somehow ‘equal’ as well. Even in the most economically inclusive and participatory polity in the ancient world, namely democratic Athens, Athenian democrats regarded certain people – namely native-born adult male citizens – as worthier and weightier than other ones – be they women, children, slaves or ‘barbarians’, or even other Greeks, including resident aliens like Aristotle. The point of equality then, even in Athens, was to ensure that no unequal part or person could over-balance the polity by outweighing or dominating the rest.

So far, my historical survey would appear to vindicate Dworkin’s ‘egalitarian plateau’ idea. While the ancient Greeks undoubtedly possessed sophisticated ideas about political equality, they also clearly believed in the basic inequality of human beings. Surely, then, modern egalitarianism must mark a radical break with this irredeemably hierarchical past?

Not so fast. Because elsewhere in the ancient world one finds statements remarkably similar to Dworkin’s ‘axiom’ of basic human equality – namely, in the Roman Empire. Consider the following extract from Ulpian, an imperial jurist of the early 3rd century CE, preserved in Justinian’s Digest: ‘As far as concerns the civil law, slaves are regarded as nothing; but as far as concerns the natural law, all humans are equal (aequales).’

Here, we find what many philosophers today regard as a characteristically modern claim: that all humans (even slaves) are naturally equal. But, in context, Ulpian clearly meant something different. He was not saying that all people ought to be treated as equals, legally or politically, let alone that they must be afforded the same rights or resources. Ulpian’s point, rather, was that even enslaved people were equally subject to something he called ‘natural’ law, which applied to every human being without exception.

In the Hebrew Bible, the conceptual language of equality is conspicuously absent

For Ulpian, then, it seems that the ‘equality’ of human beings meant something more like indifference. Indeed, much like a modern French speaker declaring ça m’est égal, the law of nature took no notice of the extreme differences of power, wealth or status otherwise governing life within the Roman Empire. In other words, and much like the sun or rain or death, it fell indifferently on everyone, male or female, free or slave. But this ‘natural’ did not therefore deny or otherwise erase the many hierarchies characteristic of Roman life (or law). It simply identified a (necessarily limited) perspective of natural justice from which those hierarchies could be regarded as irrelevant.

This observation of the Roman origins of the idea of natural equality challenges another, more familiar story about the sources of modern egalitarianism. To many modern readers, the biblical language of ‘creation’ found in the Declaration of Independence suggests that the equality of human beings was originally a religious idea, whether a Jewish or a Christian one. Yet if one consults the Hebrew Bible, the conceptual language of equality is conspicuously absent. In Genesis, the biblical God creates human beings, male and female, ‘in his own image’. But this divine likeness, in turn, does nothing to preclude the many forms of divinely sanctioned or permitted hierarchy, including slavery and patriarchy, found elsewhere in the Bible.

It is only later, in the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, that we find Roman Christian apologists like St Cyprian and Lactantius resisting persecution by deliberately combining the biblical account of human creation in ‘God’s image or likeness’, on the one hand, with the Roman legal language of ‘equality’ as a universal standard of legal justice, on the other. The result was an entirely new – and highly influential – way of talking about divine justice in Latin Christendom. Unlike the Roman civil law, the Christian God had been revealed to be truly ‘no respecter of persons’. Thus in his eyes, the worldly distinctions of slave and free, rich and poor, male and female, would one day count for nothing. All would instead be judged ‘equally’ – that is, by the same divine standard – and then rewarded or punished in proportion with their spiritual merit.

We can now see why, for most of its history, ‘equality talk’ proved not only consistent with hierarchy, but fundamentally supportive of it. It’s not because Greek democrats, Roman jurists and Christian theologians were paying lip service to an ideal they didn’t believe in, or that they were incapable of following through on the egalitarian logic of their own commitments. It’s because people in the past moved much less easily than we do from the premise that all (or some) people are equal towards the conclusion that they should, therefore, be treated as equals in a social or evaluative sense. To be ‘equal’ in the eyes of God, or of the law, or of a democratic lottery, simply meant that certain of our differences shouldn’t matter for that particular purpose. It did not follow that those differences must therefore be deemed irrelevant for every purpose, or that all humans were thus sufficiently alike in virtue or value to be treated socially or politically as peers. Indeed, emphasising the former equality was often a way of bringing the manifest disparities between certain individuals or social groups into sharper relief, thus fitting them for hierarchical relations.

And yet, the same proliferation of historical meanings – as evenness and absence, balance and proportion, indifference and parity – that accounts for this disconnect, can in turn explain how ‘equality talk’ finally gained a new and uniquely powerful political force in early modern England. And, with that force, ordinary Englishmen and women began to exploit its many ambiguities in order to demand not only equal justice, but equal standing with the privileged.

To locate the precise moment of transformation, we must look beyond the summer of 1776, back to the summer of 1646, when a man called John Lilburne found himself on trial for libel before the House of Lords. Today, Lilburne is remembered chiefly as a leader of the Leveller movement active during the English Civil War. And the Levellers are remembered for demanding universal manhood suffrage at the Putney Debates of 1647, several centuries before it became a reality in modern Britain. Summoned before the Peers the previous June, however, Lilburne had done something comparatively trivial. He simply refused to kneel or to remove his hat before his aristocratic judges. His reason? That God had created ‘every particular and individual man and woman that ever breathed in the world … all equal and alike in power, dignity, authority and majesty.’ Hence no one could claim any ‘authority, dominion or magisterial power’ over another without their ‘mutual agreement or consent’.

The Leveller movement pushed this conceptual ambiguity to the hilt across pamphlets, protests and petitions

So much for balance! So much for indifference! In that moment, Lilburne somehow managed to turn the equality of human beings before God into a demand that even commoners like himself could stand on the same level, as peers, with their supposed betters here on earth. In this way, Lilburne’s proposition offered an early – and indeed more radical – version of the levelling logic found later in the US Declaration of Independence. For starters, it explicitly included women among those created equal and entitled to an equal voice in how they were to be governed. (In the US, this addendum would have to wait more than 70 years, until the Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848.)

How did Lilburne do it? Well, he started by collapsing a conceptual distinction that earlier English equality talk had generally preserved, that between being ‘equal’ – in the sense being subject to or judged by the same standard – and being ‘an equal’ in the social and evaluative sense of being someone’s peer. In hindsight, we can see that Lilburne was assisted in this effort by a broader conceptual looseness in early modern English, by which many of the classical distinctions inherited from Greek and Latin had started to dissolve. For instance, in the earliest English translation of Aristotle’s Politics, published in 1598, the translator simply erased the philosophical distinction between being ‘equal’ (isos) and being ‘similar’ (homoios) by translating both terms as ‘equal’.

Such slippages undoubtedly offend against philosophical precision. Politically speaking, however, they created opportunities. Lilburne noticed one such opportunity in Magna Carta, specifically in its guarantee to every free man in the realm the right to a trial per pares, or by his peers. In early modern English, ‘peer’ could of course mean a social equal of whatever degree, high or low. But increasingly in political usage, it could also mean a member of the English aristocracy. If every ‘freeborn’ Englishman and woman had the right to be tried by ‘the lawful judgment of [their] peers (or equals)’, as Lilburne put it, then surely he or she must also be ‘entitled unto an equal privilege’ with the greatest Peer in the Commonwealth, as in Creation.

The Leveller movement subsequently pushed this conceptual ambiguity to the hilt across countless pamphlets, protests and petitions, in which they demanded not only that English commoners be treated ‘equally’ with aristocrats before the law, but also that they enjoy all of the political benefits of peerage. Thomas Rainborough’s celebrated demand for ‘equal voice’ at Putney, through a radical expansion of the franchise, followed the same levelling logic: ‘For really I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he.’ So did a remarkable 1649 Leveller women’s petition presented to the House of Commons, in which the female petitioners declared:

That since we are assured of our Creation in the image of God, and of an interest in Christ, equal unto men, as also of a proportionable share in the Freedoms of this Common wealth, we cannot but wonder and grieve that we should appear so despicable in your eyes, as to be thought unworthy to Petition or represent our Grievances to this Honourable House.

In this way, even as the Leveller movement failed, its new way of talking about equality lived on. We find versions of its levelling logic in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), or in the writings of the so-called ‘first English feminist’ (and staunch Tory) Mary Astell, as well as in the US Declaration of Independence. Across these very different texts, with their different political conclusions, the language of equality continued to perform its distinctive function, cutting the great ones down to size while raising up the marginal and excluded to meet them. To claim equality was thus no longer merely to demand that the same law, or the same God, apply the same standards indifferently. It was to demand recognition as an equal in society: that is, someone entitled to speak, judge and be heard as a peer.

For centuries, it seems, this was the primary political function of equality talk. But, today, this language has lost much of its levelling power. At the same time, talk of equality no longer unifies, it disillusions and divides. Why?

Perhaps the problem ultimately lies with what made this conceptual language so appealing in the first place. Far from being simple, let alone self-evident, its history reveals that equality has accumulated a remarkable number of meanings over time. And when it comes to how human beings ought to relate to one another, those different meanings – as absence or balance, indifference or parity – are often in tension, if not outright contradiction.

Is it any wonder, then, that we talk past each other! Even as the word ‘equality’ suggests that better measurement or reasoning ought to resolve our disagreements. Now, one might conclude from this – as many contemporary progressives have done – that we would be better off rejecting equality altogether, in favour of some other, less historically ambiguous ideal. But that would, I think, be a mistake. Because historically, the problem with equality talk – namely, its conceptual ambiguity – has also been the source of its uncommon power.

English women could be tried by juries, but they did not ordinarily sit on them

Again, consider Lilburne. His better-educated critics could (and did) object that his ‘general Proposition’ to the Lords was a non sequitur. It simply didn’t follow from the premise that God created men and women as equally subject to his divine justice, that they should therefore be recognised politically as peers. But this criticism did not stop Lilburne and his fellow Levellers from trading on the many different meanings of equality and drawing their own political conclusions. And their success was not simply a matter of ingenious wordplay or conceptual sleight of hand. The plausibility of their insistence that English commoners were just as capable of thinking and speaking for themselves as Peers rested on a familiar institution: the jury. When ‘12 men of the neighbourhood’ sat in judgment over a fellow commoner, their differences of wealth, occupation, education and ability didn’t disappear. They simply ceased to matter for the purposes of reaching a verdict. Hence the jurors came to see one another as ‘peers and equals’ because the institution required them to act as peers, as they listened, deliberated and judged together.

In this way, the ‘doing’ of equality proceeded the idea of it. But if Leveller ‘equality talk’ rested on a particular social practice, the limits of that practice mattered, too. English women could be tried by juries, but they did not ordinarily sit on them; enslaved Africans in the English Atlantic, although admittedly ‘created Men’, were regarded as too ‘brutish’ to enjoy that privilege. For centuries, accordingly, these groups would struggle to leverage the same arguments in the absence of social practices and institutions within which they, too, could act – and be seen to act – as peers and equals.

So much for the past. What about the future? Well, in the first place, the above analysis suggests that the work of making ‘equality talk’ meaningful is not primarily philosophical, it’s practical. Nonetheless, philosophers often proceed as though any difficulties with equality must be logical or definitional. If only we could identify the respect in which every person is ‘equal’ with enough precision, then our disagreements about justice would dissolve. But history suggests that the more important task is that of sustaining the social practices and institutions that make equality meaningful in the first place. (Hence, the reticence of contemporary relational egalitarians to spell out what equality demands of us in positive terms, beyond a general resistance to hierarchical relations, is a serious defect.)

So what would an historically informed approach to equality look like? For one thing, it would require attending to (or even just attending) things like jury service, among the other increasingly uncommon offline sites in which we encounter other people who are not like us – in bulk, excellence or ideology – as peers. Today, these sites are threatened not only by frictionless technologies like large language models or social media, but also by the growing price-stratification of so many consumer experiences – what Michael Sandel in 2012 dubbed the ‘skyboxification of American life’. But taking part in such activities on more even terms doesn’t make us identical, nor does it mean that we agree. It just means that we commit ourselves, for a limited time and purpose, to not letting our differences determine which of us matters – or whose voice ought to count.

Because, if history tells us anything, it’s that equality is not primarily an idea to be believed in, nor a partisan commitment to affirm. It’s something people did, and something we must do. Only then are we created equal – not by ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’, but by each other, every day.