Conceptualizing Politics

particularly with the cult for the almost superhuman Chief (Duce in Italy, Führer in 
Germany, Conducator in Romania); racism is one of its sub-types. More influential 
today is an instrumental defence of inequality as means to produce higher economic 
efficiency, allegedly to everybody’s advantage: higher wages motivate workers to 
more productivity, higher profits encourage business owners to more risk-taking 
and innovation, while more wealth stimulates more investment and job creation in 

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168  Ethics and politics
a trickle-down effect – a link rather dissolved by the extreme financialization of 
the economy. Another, less ideological argument, is concerned with the political 
and economic costs of egalitarianism: public policies aimed at fostering more equal-
ity not just of income, but also in the access to health care and education require 
the build-up of huge welfare bureaucracies that take much of the citizens’ private 
life under administrative control and spread uniformity into the tissue of society – 
though this old-liberal point ‘equality vs. liberty’ has been less and less debated in 
the last two decades. Yet the economic cost of egalitarian policies remains a crucial 
issue: the way they have been managed after 1945 have often produced either too 
many entitlements or too expensive administrations or both, has been increasingly 
inefficient and has created new inequalities, for example disfavouring the unem-
ployed or uninsured youth. Combined with the fiscal crisis of the state and the rise 
of public debt, due to the costs of egalitarianism being covered by huge borrowing 
by the state rather than redistributive policies, these developments have engendered 
a nearly perfect storm in many countries, particularly in those with unfavourable 
demographic trends. Does all this announce the end of egalitarianism?
Not necessarily. Once again, the concept must be disassembled into its main 
versions, which have only one feature in common, that is a preference for equality 
rather than inequality. Radical egalitarianism, in the sense of pursuing a general 
equalisation of incomes and positions, a posture that has largely disappeared from 
literature and politics, is very different from the attitude aimed at containing a 
further rise in inequality and compensating for the peak already reached. Likewise 
important in rethinking egalitarianism is the attention to new forms of inequal-
ity (say, the digital divide) and the perverse effects of some former measures of 
equalisation.
8
In any of its versions, equality belongs within the field of positive liberty. The 
moderate version which we briefly sketched avoids the danger of the pervasive, 
paternalist shape of positive liberty. Another notable characteristic is that equal-
ity, the leading value of democracy, is not necessarily in harmony – as frequently 
mentioned in this book – with liberty, the main virtue of liberalism, and can even 
collide with it – a tension reproducing the tension that inhabits the very notion 
of liberty, between its negative and positive versions. Reconciling these several val-
ues with each other in the institutions of liberal democracy has been neither an 
easy task nor a short journey, as it took some 150 years; also the achieved balance 
is not warranted to stand under the new strains and constraints that are recently 
(2016–2017) emerging as an unexpected backlash to globalisation. This knowledge 
seems to be unknown or uninteresting to the populist detractors of present-day 
democracy.