Equality - Overview - Ancient Views Of Equality, Equality In The Church And The Protestant Reformation, Liberalism, Civic Republicanism, And The Age Of Revolution
concept political tradition philosophical
Though simple as a mathematical concept, equality is complex and contested as a political goal and philosophical concept. Many political struggles, both historical and ongoing, have engaged in the contests over the nature of equality. This contestation revolves around the basic question, What kinds of equality matter? The answer to this in part depends on whether the topic is approached from a predominantly political, economic, ethical/philosophical, or social perspective. Discussing the history of ideas on the concept of equality poses two further challenges. First, equality is so intimately related to the concept of justice that it is impossible to fully untangle the two. Second, there are so many voices and movements to consider on the subject that any concise discussion requires difficult choices on who to include and who to neglect. This overview thus will (1) touch on many (but not all) the important thinkers and developments in the history of ideas in the Western tradition, and (2) introduce some of the major debates and conflicts in that tradition over the concept of equality.
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For the purposes of understanding the concept of equality within the Western tradition, one has to look back to the two most influential strands of thought that inform the modern West: the Hebrew (and later Judeo-Christian) tradition and the Greek. While the Hebrews did not undertake an analysis of the concept of equality, the worldview and subsequent laws were steeped with a sense of equality unu…
During the Middle Ages, there were two important developments that affect the modern conception of equality. First, a natural law tradition developed around the notion that all humans, as God's creations, are owed certain rights and protections and that these natural laws cannot be altered by political
associations or rulers. Thus we see in thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–…
Modern conceptions of equality are deeply rooted in both the liberal and civic republican traditions of thought as well as in the age of revolution. Here we will look at each of these as well as at the socialist challenge to liberalism in particular. As we will see, in addition to natural, legal, and political forms of equality, economic equality (or inequality) also concerns many modern thinkers.…
The civic republican tradition—including thinkers such as Aristotle, Niccoló Machiavelli (1469–1527), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)—differs from that of the early liberals by emphasizing economic inequality as a threat to liberty and democratic government. For Rousseau, liberal social contract theory undermines itself in…
Although the socialist tradition is much more diverse than this choice suggests, we will focus on the ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883) as exemplary of the socialist critique of liberal capitalism. The political economic philosophy of Marx approaches economic inequalities with a concern for freedom, rejecting the liberal assumption that economic inequalities do not affect political equalities …
Critics of free-market capitalism attack these claims on philosophical, historical, and practical bases. Many question whether indeed the market is a just distributor of the economic products and economic burdens of a society—and therefore whether economic inequalities are just in and of themselves. More generally, non-Marxist critics such as Michael Walzer want a society in which no social…
Since the mid-1800s, equality has been the rallying cry in the United States for abolitionists, suffragists, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, gay and lesbian movements, and even some sectors of the environmental movement. One striking aspect of many such movements is their persistence in appropriating the language of the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created…
Many political thinkers have worried that applications of an ideal of equality may undermine freedom. For Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), equality can easily come to dominate people's political aspirations. As he puts it, citizens (Americans in particular) "want equality in freedom, and if they cannot have that, they still want equality in slavery" (p. 506). Worse, p…
For political thinkers concerned with what constitutes good democratic politics, concentrations of power are sources of concern wherever they are found. This is especially the case when these concentrations of power threaten the basic democratic notion that citizens should have a meaningful capacity to govern themselves and participate on a roughly equal basis with other citizens in their collecti…
Appleby, Joyce. Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s. New York: New York University Press, 1984. ——. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. 3 vols. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benzinger Bros., 1948. Arend…
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12 months ago
overview of eqality