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ABSTRACT
This article investigates the origins and impact of an assumption: that humanity is moving in the direction of an expanding equality, and that the arc of history is taking us there. That notion has roots stretching back at least to the eighteenth century, and was developed in important ways in the century that followed, before coming to fruition in the twentieth century, above all in the global north in the aftermath of the Second World War. The assumption was reinforced by groups coming from very different political and ideological orientations, and it was precisely the shared and overlapping nature of the assumption that gave it broad purchase, allowing it to serve as an extensive, if often largely unexamined, horizon of expectations. By tracing converging instances of the assumption over the longue durée, this article aims to show how intellectuals, economists, and policymakers generated a set of expectations about the future of equality that, however inspiring, were often at variance with actual trends. Better understanding those future’s pasts, it is suggested, may help us to conceive more clearly why so many were caught unawares by inequality’s resurgence in our own time, and to face the challenges that resurgence poses more resolutely.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Teresa Bejan, David A. Bell, Leslie Butler, Christian O. Christiansen, Nils Gilman, Samuel Moyn, Timothy Nunan, Anne Phillips, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Aditya Sarkar, Siep Stuurman, Charles Walton, and Daniel Zamora for their helpful hints and suggestions, as well as the generous and perceptive participants in the online symposium, ‘Towards a Global Intellectual History of an Unequal World,’ sponsored by Aarhus University in June 2021 and those of the Warwick University History Research Seminar on 27 October 2021.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Obama, Inaugural Address, 21 January 2013, paragraph 20. See, as well, Obama’s remarks on the promise of equality in the preface to his A Promised Land, xv–xvi.
2 On these connections, see Dorrien, Breaking White Supremacy, 1–24.
3 See McMahon, “The Return of the History of Ideas?,” 13–32.
4 Graeber and Wengrow, Dawn of Everything, 75–6; Stuurman, Invention of Humanity, 258–96.
5 Gregory, Liber regulae pastoralis, 2.6. On egalitarian notions in the Axial traditions, see Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 573–7.
6 Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 187–280.
7 Stuurman, Invention of Humanity, 259; Ozouf, 670–1; Rosanvallon, Society of Equals, 12–74.
8 Anderson, Private Government, 10.
9 Morris, Foragers, 87.
10 Hoekstra, “Hobbesian Equality,” 94–6; Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 21–43.
11 Stuurman, Invention of Humanity, 259.
12 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 6–11.
13 Mably, De la legislation (1759–1761), cited in Reichardt, “Égalité,” 102.
14 Meeks, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, esp. 131–77.
15 Spitz, L’Amour de l’égalité, esp. 107–71 261–6.
16 Arnold, “Equality,” in Culture and Anarchy, 217.
17 Mounier, On the Influence, 40–1.
18 Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, 10th époque.
19 Ibid. Also cited in Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 117–18.
20 Maréchal, “Manifesto of the Equals,” lines 14–19.
21 Constant, “Du moment actuel,” 372–3.
22 Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Vol. 1), 12.
23 Tocqueville, Old Regime, 207.
24 Ozouf, “Equality,” 674.
25 Ibid., 682.
26 Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 147–50.
27 The language of ‘truncation and fulfillment’ is that of Moyn, “On the Nonglobalization of Ideas,” 187–204. See as well the insightful commentary of Getachew, “Universalism after the post-colonial turn,” 821–845. Both essays cite and analyze the work of Buck-Morrs, Dubois, Blackburn, and Hunt mentioned here.
28 Moyn, “On the Nonglobalization of Ideas,” 190.
29 Sand cited in Arnold, “Equality,” 214.
30 On the woman question in this context, see Butler, “Woman Question in the Age of Democracy,” 37–56 and Andrews, “Woman Question: Liberal and Socialist Critiques,” 255–78.
31 Martineau, Society in America, 1: 144, 148, 152–3, 154.
32 Taylor, “Enfranchisement of Women,” 289 .
33 Mill, On the Subjection of Women, 133–4 and 159.
34 Wallerstein, “French Revolution as World-Historical Event,” 33–52.
35 On the range of conservative responses to equality, see Honderich, Conservatism, 169–208.
36 Arnold cited in Tawney, Equality, 34.
37 Moyn, Not Enough, 37–8.
38 Schivelbusch, Three New Deals; On Italian Fascist ‘true equality,’ see, for example, Talarico, Le due Rivoluzioni, 69–87, 227–41. The full title is taken from a citation by Mussolini, which serves as the work’s epigraph.
Il secolo scorso proclamò l’eguaglianza dei cittadini dinanzi alla legge – e fu una conquista di portata formidabile. Il secolo fascista mantiene, anzi consolida questo principio, ma ve ne aggiunge un altro non meno fondamentale: l’eguaglianza degli oumini dinanzi al lavoro inteso come dovere e come diritto … . (v).
39 Hill, Gleichheit und Artgleichheit.
40 Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries, 1–35; Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution, 55–64, 77–8, 273–4. Compare, Evans, Third Reich in Power, 497–503 and Tooze, “What Held Nazi Germany Together?”
41 Mishra, Age of Anger, 64–5.
42 Blanqui, “Social Wealth,” Le Libérateur.
43 Proudhon, What is Property?, 94.
44 Cabet, Voyage en Icarie, 462. Cabet provides a potted history of equality’s providential advance through time in the “Tableau historique des progrès de la Démocatie et de l’égalité,” in Part 2, Chs. IX–X, 407–64.
45 See, for example, Wood, “Marx on Equality,” 252–73; Texier, “Marx, Penseur égalitaire?,” 45–66. Contrast, Nielsen, “On Marx Not Being an Egalitarian,” 287–326.
46 Moyn, Not Enough, 36–7.
47 Engels to August Bebel, 18–28 March 1875.
48 Engels, Anti-Dühring, Chap. 10 (“Morality and Law. Equality”).
49 Lenin, “First All-Russia Congress,” 6–19 May.
50 Malia, Soviet Tragedy, 516. See also, Furet, Preface to Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique, 40–1.
51 Stites, Utopian Dreams, 124.
52 Wright, Socialisms Old and New, 31.
53 “The Minute Book of the General Council,” 3 January 1865.
54 Bebel, Society of the Future, ch. 8, “Woman in the Future” (paragraph 14).
55 Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 199.
56 Ibid., 139.
57 Although global income and wealth inequalities are notoriously difficult to calculate due in part to inconsistencies in the data, the overall patterns are clear. See Bourguignon, Globalization of Inequality, 9–40; Bourguignon and Morrison, “Inequality Among World Citizens,” 727–44; Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 294–321; Milanovic, Global Inequality, 118–54.
58 Stuurman, Invention of Humanity, 25. His ‘fourth and final objection to a Whig history of equality concerns what happened between the later eighteenth century and the Fall of the Berlin wall.’
59 Scheidel, Great Leveler, 5–9.
60 Piketty’s latest volume Une brève histoire de l’égalité was published after I had completed a substantial draft of this article. Although I have tried to incorporate some of his latest findings, I have not been able to do the book, which makes an impassioned case for the existence of a ‘long-term movement toward equality,’ full justice here (52). To my mind, and judging by his own economic figures, his case is considerably stronger for the twentieth century than for the period between 1789 and 1914.
61 Piketty, Brève histoire de l’égalité, 177–217.
62 In addition to Piketty and Scheidel, see Lindert and Williamson, Unequal Gains, 194–219. The Great Compression, they note, constituted ‘a revolutionary fall … unlike anything experienced in any other documented period in history’ (196).
63 Milanovic, Global Inequality, 130–1.
64 Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, 7.
65 Tawney, Equality, 10.
66 Moyn, Not Enough, 44–5; Jackson, Equality and British Left, 38–53 and 203–08.
67 See, for example, Broberg and Roll-Hansen, eds. Eugenics and the Welfare State; Frader, Breadwinners and Citizens; Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White; Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity; Pederson, Family, Dependence, and Origins of Welfare State, 336–54.
68 Moyn, Not Enough, 104.
69 Ibid., 91. See in general Ch. 4, “Globalizing Welfare after Empire,” 89–119, and Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire, esp. Ch. 5, “The Welfare World of the New International Economic Order,” 142–76.
70 Myrdal cited in Moyn, Not Enough, 105–07. And see the analysis in Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire, 160–2.
71 Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 202. Gilman describes modernization theory as the ‘foreign policy counterpart’ to the golden age of the welfare state (17).
72 Shils cited in Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 1.
73 Grewal and Purdy, “Inequality Rediscovered,” 65. I was pointed to this fine article after having completed a draft of the current essay. Its general depiction of the optimism regarding the spread of equality in the postwar period tracks closely with my own.
74 The classic article is Kuznets, “Economic Growth and Economic Equality,” 11–14.
75 For a discussion of Kuznets’s continued relevance, see Milanovic, Global Inequality, 46–118.
76 Seung, “Is Rising Income Inequality far from Inevitable?,” 229.
77 On the renewed interest in Tocqueville in the United States in this period, see Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 50. In France, see Audier, Tocqueville retrouvé.
78 Galbraith, Affluent Society, 69.
79 Ibid., 80.
80 Aron, Raymond, Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society, 241.
81 Mkandawire and Haq cited in Macekura, Mismeasure of Progress, 90–93.
82 Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire, 144, 160–75.
83 Cited in Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire, 168.
84 Therborn, Killing Fields of Inequality, 48–54, 79–80, 86.
85 Bourguignon, Globalization of Inequality, 27–29.
86 See Christiansen, “Introduction, Histories of Global Inequality,” 6–9; Christiansen, “The Making of Global Inequality.”
87 C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” paragraphs 1 and 8.
88 Malcolm X, “At the Audobon,” in Malcom X Speaks, 90.
89 For various examples, see King, A Testament of Hope, 52, 88, 207, 252, 277.
90 Scott, Sex and Secularism, 109–114.
91 Delap, Feminisms, 27, 49.
92 Therborn, Killing Fields of Inequality, 86–7.
93 Steven Pinker summarizes the rosier data in his chapter “Equal Rights” in Enlightenment Now, 214–32. But see the wide-ranging critiques of his general optimism in Dwyer and Micale, eds., The Darker Angels of our Nature.
94 See Tribe, “Constitutional Inevitability,” 471–89; Blore, “Sexuality Law Reform,” 391–423.
95 Dworkin, “Comment on Narveson,” 24.
96 Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 4.
97 Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 1–2.
98 Pojman, “Introduction,” Equality, 1.
99 Phillips, “Gender and Modernity,” 843. And see, most recently, her Unconditional Equals, esp. 4–11 and 18–40.
100 On floors and ceilings, see Moyn, Not Enough, 4, 9, 13, 16, 50, 60, 213–19.
101 Phillips, “Gender and Modernity,” 843.
102 Fukuyama, “March of Equality,” 11–17.
103 Sandel, Tyranny of Merit, 54.
104 Ibid., 55.
105 Piketty, Brève Histoire de l’égalité, 29.