Conceptualizing Politics

2.   Equality and egalitarianism
Equality, which has the appearance of a simple notion, is no less complex than 
liberty, with which it is closely linked. This author sees little chance of reproducing 
on a small scale the intricacies of the intense debate that started with the publica-
tion of Rawls’s opus magnum in 1971 and found a new peak with the publication 
of Ronald Dworkin’s Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality in 2002. It 
will be necessary to skip some philosophical developments while focusing on the 
aspects that can be seen as most relevant in a political perspective.
Equality makes its first appearance in the Greek polis, an anti-egalitarian, slave-
owning society, in the shape of 
ἰσονομία/isonomy or equality before the law, a right 
for sure reserved to the citizens. The equality of all human beings before God, intro-
duced by Christendom, but also present in Judaism and Islam, is a big cultural shift, 
though it remained socially and politically ineffective – except in Christian charities 
over the centuries and later in the Christian social movements of the nineteenth and 
twentieth century. As a social principle, equality pops up in modern revolutions, with 
radical turns represented by the Diggers in the English Revolution and Gracchus 
Babeuf ’s conspiration pour l’égalité/conspiracy for equality in the French Revolution. 
Marx was interested in unveiling the inequality hidden in the alleged equal and right-
ful exchange between capital and wage labour rather than in preaching equality in 

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164  Ethics and politics
general; he believed that the equal exchange between compensation and amount of 
work provided by a single person, a principle characterising the first stage of commu-
nist society, would later make room for the formula ‘from each according to his ability, 
to each according to his needs’ – thus establishing an equal procedure respecting and 
promoting everybody’s individuality (Marx 1875).
In modern history, inequality worldwide went down from its previous peaks 
after 1860 and particularly during the Great Depression of 1929, while gathering 
again momentum after 1977 as a likely side effect of globalisation, which can on the 
other hand be credited for bringing down inequality among countries. The recent 
and unmistakable growth of income inequality within countries as well as the dis-
appearance of any alternative economic model like the socialist one may stay in the 
background of the growing philosophical attention on equality as an ethical (rather 
than political) guideline for course corrections inside capitalism. It could also be 
asked if the arguments in favour of equality and redistribution, such as Rawls’s 
(1999, §11) second principle of justice (difference principle), are not to be seen 
as a post-festum justification of the social policies launched by the New Deal and 
heavily under attack since the rise of neoliberalism with all its rhetoric in favour of 
inequality as a path to wealth. As Hegel wrote in the Preface to his Grundlinien der 
Philosophie des Rechts/Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ‘When philosophy paints 
its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be 
rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva [scil. philosophy] takes its flight 
only when the shades of night are gathering’ (1821, 8).
* * *
Of all the major differentiations the concept under examination allows for, we 
shall mention the following: substantive vs. procedural equality; equality of welfare/
equality of opportunities/equality of capabilities. The two sets of notions overlap 
only partially.
Substantive equality places emphasis on the equality of the things that are a mat-
ter of redistribution, thus consisting of the possession of a nearly equal amount of 
the goods that are regarded as relevant to the actor’s social condition. If it has to be 
exactly the same number, Aristotle at the outset (1301)
3
 of Book 5, Part 1 of Politics 
calls it numeric equality in all things, as proposed – he adds – by democrats, while 
their extreme counterpart, the oligarchs, vow for a likewise complete inequality. 
Proportional equality means, on the contrary, to treat everybody according to a 
same principle of fairness such as ‘treat like cases as like’ or ‘whatever the outcome 
in terms of goods, you will be treated not equally, but with equal respect for your 
dignity and concerns’.
In the triad mentioned above, the great divide lies between equality of welfare or 
positions and the other two. In the former, the goal of society and government is 
seen as providing everybody, or rather every citizen, with the same degree of well-
being as based on a less and less unequal portion of material and relational goods. 
In its roughest version this takes the form of the state’s monetary disbursements to 

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Liberty, equality and rights  165
the advantage of the worse-off. There is evidently a problem with the measurement 
of welfare, which can be done either authoritatively from the top, at the risk of 
infringing the individual’s autonomy, or referring to preference satisfaction, which 
creates a delicate problem of either allowing chaos or filtering preferences accord-
ing to a criterion almost impossible to reach by consensus.