‘We hold’, wrote Thomas Jefferson (1747–1826), ‘these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent’. No natural scientist qua scientist could do other than dismiss such a statement as either meaningless or empirically false. Equality for a mathematician is a concept of some complexity in relation, for example, to identity or correlation, but one of no moral significance. Social scientists by contrast are latecomers to a debate about equality which is unresolved because it adds to the mathematician’s complexity the further complications of moral argument. Equality refers to the principles on which human society ought to, as well as might, be based. Jefferson’s was a moral declaration, not an empirical description. Social science attempts to explore the empirical validity of such declarations. The question is whether, and in what sense, social, political and economic equalities are possible. The answer is tentative, requiring the determination of the origins of inequality, the significance of inequality, and the viability of action intended to establish equality. All three aspects are disputed.
Traditional discussion of the origins of inequality turned on a crude distinction between nature and society. Modern recognition of cultural evolution complicates that distinction and tends to substitute a more elaborate matrix out of the consequences of interaction between genetic and environmental influences. But in neither simple nor sophisticated discussion is there denial of natural inequalities, the Jeffersonian declaration notwithstanding. Humans are not clones, and Mendelian genetics guarantees variation. Dispute, however, continues in important areas of scientific ignorance. For example, there is not adequate scientific evidence to settle the dispute between those who believe in the genetic basis of differences between ethnic or racial or class groups in educational attainment or performance in intelligence tests, and those who hold such differences to be socially created. Resolution of such disputes is, in principle, possible through the further advance of empirically tested theories of the interaction between heredity and environment.
Meanwhile dispute about the significance of natural differences continues its long history. Plato confidently argued from natural to political inequality. Hobbes in Leviathan (1934 [1651]) expressed the opposite view:
Nature hath made man so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself and benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he.
Hobbes’s formulation still defines the debate. Egalitarian claims, especially with respect to race and gender, are more strident now than they were in the seventeenth century, and we would now say that Hobbes was making empirical propositions from both genetics and sociology, the one referring to natural differences and the other (about claiming and pretending) referring to the social psychology of human perceptions of social rights. But the central assertion is fundamentally about the values which ought to be reflected in the actual relations of men and women in society.
In this sense the debate, turning as it does on ethical priorities between such values as equality, liberty and fraternity, may never be finally resolvable. There have been, to be sure, notable contributions to greater conceptual clarity as to the meaning of terms. John Rawls (1971) adopts the device of the ‘original position’—an ‘if so’ story of the rational choices that might be expected from an individual contemplating different societies with known different equalities or inequalities of positions but an unknown placement for the contemplator—to illuminate the problems of value choice. Brian Barry (1973) takes the discussion further to demonstrate how a small adjustment to Rawls’s social and psychological assumptions opens the possibility of a crucial shift of preference towards egalitarian rather than liberal forms of society. But no amount of conceptual clarification, sophisticated or erudite, solves the problem of evaluation.
The social sciences can, however, note the provenance of different priorities. One mundane but momentous perspective recurs down the ages—the recognition of mortality. Thus Horace (BC 65–8) wrote: ‘Pale death kicks his way equally into the cottages of the poor and the castles of kings.’ And James Shirley (1596–1666) reminds us that
Death lays his icy hand on kings Sceptre and crown Must tumble down And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
This attitude is integral to Christian social teaching, which dominated the evaluation of equality at least until the eighteenth century. It was not that natural inequalities between individuals were denied so much as deemed irrelevant in discussing the rights and wrongs of dictatorship or democracy, freedom or slavery. Christians were not only ‘equal before the Cross’ but, as the early Church Fathers insisted, would, if they eschewed sin, live like brothers without inequalities of property and power. Sin, since the fall of Adam, had created earthly inequality. Political inequality might be necessary to protect order and restrain evil, but it did not arise, as Plato had imagined, from natural inequality. Political inequality in Christian tradition must be endured but by no means implied a necessary respect or admiration for the rich and the powerful. On the contrary, position in the next world was typically held to be threatened by privilege in this. ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek,’ says the Magnificat.
The break with Christian attitudes of submission to inequality dates from the eighteenth century, with the decline of religious belief and the beginnings of a secular optimism with respect to the possibility of social transformation. Egalitarianism as a movement is commonly associated with Rousseau. But Rousseau, though believing that the evils of unfreedom and inequality were socially created, was a remorseless pessimist. He held that freedom was impossible except in a community of equals, but held out no hope of social transformation towards equality. In this sense he was a child of Christianity, and if the early socialists (Fourier, Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, William Thompson) were his intellectual children they were also crucially different in entertaining the hope of progress. Modern egalitarianism derives from this form of sociological optimism, and it was encouraged by, if by no means identical with, either the Hegelian idealist or Marxist materialist theories of the inevitability of social transformation. Hegel’s elaborate analysis of the relation between masters and slaves, and Marx’s development of it into a prediction of the future history of the working class hold out the possibility of a community of equals.
However, egalitarianism does not presuppose either the Hegelian or the Marxist theory of history. Its more fruitful contemporary discussion in the social sciences proceeds on assumptions of openness or voluntarism as opposed to necessitous history. These debates are the substance of the third aspect of the equality problem—the viability of deliberate social action aimed at reducing inequality. One theoretical approach deserves mention here because it avoids both liberal evolutionist determinism and the alternative Marxist historicism. This is T.H.Marshall’s (1950) interpretation of the development of citizenship in advanced industrial societies. Marshall shows in the case of Britain how the basic equality of membership in a society, which is rooted in the civil rights established in the eighteenth century, was extended to include political rights in the nineteenth century and certain social rights in the twentieth century, when citizenship and class have been at war as opposing principles of social distribution. Marshall’s analysis also brings out the important truth that the forces which influence the distribution of life-chances are neither mechanical nor irreversible. Class displaced feudal status with formal equality of market relations, as well as ushering in new inequalities of social condition. Citizenship promotes unequal rewards as well as equal rights, for example, state scholarships to selective university admission and universal political franchise. More generally, it may be noted that no social goal, equality, efficiency, liberty, order or fraternity may be regarded as absolute. Public policies are perforce compromises aiming at optimal balance between desired ends.
Three illustrations of the limits to egalitarianism are prominent in the form of arguments against the viability of egalitarian theory.
The first illustration concerns the immutability of occupational hierarchy, postulating a de facto necessity for some jobs to be more distasteful, unrewarding and injurious to health than others. Given that life-chances are largely determined by the individual’s occupation, a hierarchy of social advantage seems to be inescapable, and equality, as opposed to equality of opportunity, therefore unobtainable. But, egalitarians reply, a less inegalitarian society is not sociologically impossible. It is not difficult to imagine a wide range of counteracting social policies. Apart from progressive taxation and levies on wealth, there could be national service specifically designed to direct the advantaged to a period of distasteful labour. The obvious rejoinders are lodged in the name of liberty and economic efficiency, again emphasizing the relativist character of claims for any social principle. Value choice is always the nub of the issue.
A second illustration may be had from Christopher Jencks’s Inequality (1972) which essentially argues the importance of educational reform as an instrument of egalitarianism and stresses the role of chance or luck in the unequal distribution of income and occupational status. Schooling explains only 12 per cent of the variance in US incomes. But Jencks’s argument is flawed in that his evidence is about the distribution of individuals over a given structure of occupations and wages. The explanation of inequality of income accruing to jobs is not what would explain who happens to hold those jobs. Whether the inequality of the job structure is immutable remains an open question.
Finally, there is the alleged obstacle of genetic differences between races and classes of which Jensen (1972) has been an outstanding proponent. As to classes, and against Jensen’s marshalling of the evidence from studies of twins reared apart, there is the opposed conclusion of Schiff (1982) from his studies of cross-class adopted children in France. As to race, it has to be said that we do not yet have the techniques or the data to measure definitively the genetic and environmental influences on race-IQ differences. Nor does the answer really matter, for there are more important issues of equality and justice in present-day society which do not have to wait upon further advances in the social sciences.
A.H.Halsey
University of Oxford
References
Barry, B. (1973) The Liberal Theory of Justice, Oxford.
Hobbes, T. (1934 [1651]) Leviathan, Everyman edn, London.
Jencks, C. (1972) Inequality, New York.
Jensen, A. (1972) Genetics and Education, London.
Marshall, T.H. (1950) Citizenship and Social Class, Cambridge, UK .
Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA.
Schiff, M. (1982) L’Intelligence Gaspillée, Paris.
Further reading
Letwin, W. (ed.) (1983) Against Equality: Readings on Economic and Social Policy, London.
Runciman, W.G. (1966) Relative Deprivation and Social Justice, London.
