“What Was the Point of Equality?”, 2021-10-21 (; similar):
Political theorists often turn to 17th-century England and the Levellers as sources of egalitarian insight. Yet by the time the Levellers were active, the claim that human beings were “equal” by nature was commonplace. Why, in Leveller hands, did a long-standing piety consistent with social hierarchy became suddenly effectual?
Inspired by Elizabeth Anderson, this article explores what equality—and the related concept of parity—meant for the Levellers, and what “the point”, as they saw it, was.
I argue that the Levellers’ key achievement was subsuming a highly controversial premise of natural parity within the existing language of natural equality.
This suggests that modern basic equality is the product of 2, potentially contradictory, principles. This, in turn, has important normative, as well as historical and conceptual, implications for how theorists understand “the point” of equality for egalitarian movements today.
…Before the 17th century, the concept of equality as applied to human beings expressed primarily a principle of their indifference in God’s eyes and under natural law. The idea that one might enjoy a distinctive status or dignity entitled to respect was conveyed by another concept. Whereas equality applied to relations of quantity or quality, parity operated in the domain of value to describe a relation of equivalence between things that might, despite their differences, be treated “on a par.” In early modern English, parity was primarily a social concept closely associated with the division of society into 2 classes: Peers, who were “accounted” as worthy by birth, and Commoners, who were not.
That the Levellers and their contemporaries had two terms where modern egalitarians have one helps explain why we struggle to make sense of what these “early egalitarians” were up to. I argue that Lilburne and his colleagues, under pressure from critics, subsumed a highly controversial idea of natural (as opposed to social) parity under the altogether less controversial premise of natural equality. They thereby transformed a benignly formal observation of species (eg. “all men are equally human”) into an assertion of shared worthiness (“all men should be treated on a par”). The “point” of equality for the Levellers was thus that it provided a less controversial language with which to claim parity with their erstwhile “betters.”
Still, even as the Leveller premise of natural parity rejected the existence of any natural distinctions of inferiority and superiority between human beings, it nevertheless accepted the existence of natural differences between them—including the difference between the sexes—on the basis of which they justified the differential (ie. unequal) distributions of rights. As critics like Cromwell pointed out, natural equality-as-parity thus tacitly preserved a hierarchical-ordering between different kinds of person that continued to make “superior” rank worth having—as in the Levellers’ implicit distinction between those who would be treated as high-status “peers” in their society of pares (born free, English, and male), and those who would remain low-status “equals” (bondsmen, “strangers”, and women).
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