The idea of equality is a convenient intellectual fiction unknown in nature and in contradiction to the historical experience of mankind. From the chicken yard to the world of power, privilege, and status characteristic of the Soviet nomenklatura, degree and rank are of fundamental importance. Survival, whether in the wolf pack or around the office watercooler, is the consequence of biological and social hierarchy.

The neo-Darwinians have made a rather conclusive case for the importance of aggression, conflict, and achieved status for the success of animal species. Their work is based on the empirical observations of the Nobel Prize winners Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz. The sociobiologists, particularly Edward O. Wilson in Sociobiology (1975), have provocatively documented these evolutionary assumptions, which have been extensively popularized by Robert Ardrey in books like The Territorial Imperative (1966).

Natural inequality manifests itself in physical differences of intelligence, differences in beauty and physical grace, and the happenstance of being born in the right place at the right time. These are inequalities that no amount of equalization will entirely abridge.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men, to which he appended And Is It Authorized by Natural Law (1755), produced one of the most influential, suppositious, and fatuous disquisitions on equality; always in error, never in doubt. Rousseau’s theme of the original equality of men in the state of nature was taken up by Karl Marx and fashioned into the basis of his Hegelian synthetic historical system. Marx, influenced by the work of the American Lewis Henry Morgan, made notes and intended to write a book on the anthropological underpinnings of his system. Marx died before the work could be brought to completion. After the death of Marx in 1883, Friedrich Engels published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), in which the Marxist notions of the original equality and promiscuity of mankind are argued. Today, no one other than “cultural materialists” holds these empirically unverifiable ideas. The evidence of anthropology and history points in the opposite direction.

Moreover, early human societies—the Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek, and Celtic and Germanic societies of Northern Europe—were all highly stratified and hierarchical in character. Karl August von Wittfogel in Oriental Despotism (1957) argued that the civilizations of the ancient Near East, hierarchical and despotic in character, made possible the great “hydrolic civilizations” based on the efficient supply and control of water and dominated by priests and kings. Social and religious movements toward equality in early human societies are often evidence of political collapse and cultural decadence. This was the case in Mayan civilization and the civilization of the Mississippian mound-builders of Cahokia. Egyptian civilization in the first intermediate period presents conclusive evidence of a relationship between the growth of equality and civilizational collapse.

The most important source of notions of equality aside from political contrivance is religious revelation. The Old Testament asserts that man was created in the image and likeness of God and that all men (Hebrews) through the fatherhood of Abraham are to be respected. But there was no universal equality of participation, and many Jews denied inclusiveness through proselytizing and conversion. Although there are universalizing visions and calls for a widening of participation in the community and worship of the one God, even Jesus, rebuking a pagan woman who sought a miraculous cure for her daughter, said “it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs” (Matthew 15:27). To be sure, Jesus is in the course of his teaching more inclusive and increasingly universalistic in proclaiming God’s love for all mankind. However, Jesus seems to say that God’s grace is unequally apportioned: “To you it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For to him who has shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him who does not have, even that which he has shall be taken away” (Matthew 13:12).

The Christian community came to believe, particularly through Paul and Peter, that God’s saving grace is given to all without distinction, as in Paul’s famous dictum “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:25). This was, however, a religious and not a political or social program, and the political inequalities of the ancient world together with its emphasis upon degree and status were left intact.

Moreover, the predestinarian tendencies in Paul’s teaching—“Therefore He has mercy on whom He will, and whom He will He hardens” (Romans 8:18)—carried over with emphasis into the teachings of Augustine. Increasingly, men came to see political and social inequality as a consequence of the fallen nature of man, one of the many consequences of original sin.

The New Testament is not a program for social or political revolution, as the Anabaptists came to believe, an idea that Luther rejected in the strongest possible terms. Indeed, Luther believed that God’s providential order for society was such that he strengthened the prince and subordinated all, even the church, to him.

The quest for order and degree, for authority and subordination, was, in fact, strengthened rather than weakened by Christianity. The Church, East and West, was from the outset hierarchically organized. This pattern of organization was powerfully strengthened by neo-Platonic currents of thought, with their strong emphasis on “the great chain of being,” and reinforced by the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite in his De coelesti hierarchia. It is tempting to see the medieval-feudal society of order and degree as strongly influenced by the religious models.

This, however, may not have been the case, and there may be no profound relationship between religious belief and social structure. The reforms of Luther abolished the distinction between clergy and laity with the teaching of the “priesthood of all believers.” This act of religious leveling, however, did not carry over into the secular realm. Calvin embraced an absolute predestinarianism and the inequality of God’s gift of grace, and yet Calvinism was the seedbed of republicanism.

The political and social realities of feudalism contrived a system that exaggerated inequalities and made inherited status the governing political system. In medieval Germany, Eike von Repgow in the Sachsenspiegel, early in the thirteenth century, argued that the unfreedom of men in feudalism was due to the unjust use of power rather than the consequences of God’s providential order or the result of the Fall. Nonetheless, serfdom persisted in parts of Europe until well into the nineteenth century.

Theoretically, consensus and consent were, in the medieval period, the basis of both doctrine and law. Consultation did not, however, imply equality of participation. The dictum of Thomas Aquinas that “the voice of the people is the voice of God” may have, as Lord Acton said, made Thomas the “first Whig.” Nonetheless, like most Whigs Thomas did not believe in equality of participation.

The Renaissance deepened, if anything, the gulf between ruler and ruled, though the hereditary principle was weakened and arbitrary power and money became increasingly dominant. Power ceased to be spiritualized, authority was secularized, and, as Eric Voegelin phrased it, “the eschaton [wa]s immanetized.”

It is in the light of these developments that we must read the Army Debates that followed in the wake of the Puritan Revolution in England. The “Levellers” and the “Diggers” gave clear evidence of the tendency of expressions of political equality to drift into demands for equality of condition. Little wonder Cromwell repressed these movements and paved the way for a return to order and degree.

The Enlightenment made the secularization of power absolute and immanentized the eschaton. From the outset the French Revolution drifted into equality of participation and equality of condition. For a number of reasons the American Revolution, which had preceded the French Revolution, retained much of the older English constitution, with its emphasis upon social status and property, even though the frontier acted as a powerful solvent of both.

Alexis de Tocqueville, in his profound study Democracy in America, analyzed the danger of the drift of democratic politics and sought in the American example of the decentralization of power, intermediary institutions, and private property a remedy to the extremes of democratic politics that he found in France.

The Marx–Engels Communist Manifesto (1848) is the response to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835). Taken together, these two documents establish the only two possibilities for democratic politics. The danger of totalitarian equality in the Manifesto has been mitigated but not destroyed by the failures of socialism.

Socialism brings into sharpened awareness one of the chief problems associated with equality. Far from being complementary, liberty and equality are antithetical. Every increase in equality brings with it a diminution in liberty. We purchase equality at the price of liberty, and absolute equality brings with it the total loss of liberty.

By the third quarter of the nineteenth century developments in philosophy, science, and literary and artistic culture had all become elitist in character. Science, especially physics, had become esoteric. Darwin’s elaborate studies of animal and human evolution proclaimed “the survival of the fittest.” Friedrich Nietzsche invented the Übermensch, who would displace and trample “slave natures.” In literature, the moderns—Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce—appealed to the cognoscenti rather than to a popular audience. Modernist art and painting were anything but popular, as Stalinist “socialist-realism” well understood. The period after 1900 became the age of the scientific, philosophical, and artistic elite.

At the same time scientific and technological development called forth the expert and the specialist. The worker is now a member of a strictly defined hierarchy and those without specialized skills are members not of the proletariat but an untrained and uneducated underclass. The gulf between the competent and the incompetent has broadened immeasurably. Competence, moreover, is rewarded with an increasing share of the social product. The notion that one should share equally in the social product and in political power is less and less conceivable.

The political problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of maintaining the fiction of equal political participation while encouraging the increased growth of creative inequalities in society. Equality before the law, equality of opportunity, and a sense of political participation are essential to the dignity of the citizenry and the stability of the state.

Further Reading

Antony Flew, Equality in Liberty and Justice

Christopher Jencks, Inequality

Mickey Kaus, The End of Equality

This entry was originally published in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, p. 281.