Unconditional Equals

Abstract

The book arises from a distrust of the happy stories sometimes told about the progress of equality. Not the progress of material equality, for most of us know this hasn’t been going too well, but the still comforting story we tell ourselves about the progress of ideas of equality, the abandonment of older notions of natural hierarchy, and the supposedly now widespread belief that all humans are, in some basic sense, of equal worth. Much as I would like to believe that story, the evidence is against it. We do not live in an era when all are regarded as of equal worth, regardless of their sex, race, or class, and rather than treating this as a time lag—a matter of ‘not yet’ or ‘not enough’—I have come to think there is something about dominant ideas of equality that obscures, perhaps even enables, the continuing inequality