Equality

EQUALITY IN ANTIQUITY and premodern society usually meant the equal distribution of the means of production, that is, in an agrarian society, the equal distribution of farmland. This pattern reemerged in the writings of the French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was already confronted with the emergence of private ownership of the means of [Page 318]production other than farmland. Although private property could, in Rousseau's mind, not be abolished, it had to be subordinated to the interests of society.

The modern debate came with the French Revolution in 1789, whereby equality had a prominent place in the revolutionary motto “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity). The appearance of the two words equality and fraternity shows that equality in this motto was not primarily a social promise, but a solidarity as part of or an addendum to equality; it was symbolized with the third term, fraternity. It can be shown that some models of the revolutionary motto contained only the two terms liberty and equality and did not refer to fraternity. Equality in this revolutionary motto therefore stood only for equality for citizens among themselves and in the eyes of the law.

In the 19th century, voting even for men was not yet generally granted in Europe. The equality in the revolutionary motto was an ideal not yet reached universally. Nevertheless, the debate on the term equality soon became an issue in the context of the emerging social question in the age of industrialization.

Whereas the bourgeois revolutionaries of 1789 in their majority only meant equality of participation in state affairs by voting and equality of treatment in the courtroom, in the 19th century the equal distribution of wealth became a topic on the agenda. Equality in the social sense could be seen as equality in the distribution of means of production or at least in the distribution of prospects. Whereas liberalism tended to hope for equality of individual prospects through a free-market economy, socialism saw the redistribution of means of production as a necessary prerequisite for equality. This divide still characterizes the debate on the topic of (social) equality today.

At the end of the 19th century, the term equality was transferred to another field, when racism in the form of crude social Darwinism tried to postulate the inequality of human beings according to their race. This denial of the equality of all human beings led to the Holocaust against the Jews and to many hate crimes committed by racists.

This attitude influenced U.S. history up to the second half of the 20th century: the discrimination against African Americans was caused by the feeling of white Americans that nonwhite Americans were unequal. The notion “equal but different” was used to give discrimination a legalistic approach. Only when this notion was declared unconstitutional (especially in the education system), at least formal equality for all U.S. citizens was reached. Discrimination against blacks has still ongoing effects for the prospects of different groups of U.S. citizens, as unequal treatment up to the 1950s and 1960s still has an impact on the social condition of groups of different ethnic origins within the United States. It has to be emphasized that slavery at the beginning of the African-American experience in the United States was the ultimate form of inequality. Another was the apartheid regime in South Africa.

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