¹ Tocqueville, A. de, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), Vol. I, 6.Google Scholar

² Bloch, M., Feudal Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), Vol. I, 111.Google Scholar

³ Mill, J. S., Considerations on Representative Government, in Utilitarianism; On Liberty; Representative Government, Acton, H. B. ed. (London: Dent, 1972), 288.Google Scholar

⁴ Macaulay, T. B., ‘Mill's Essay on Government: Utilitarian Logic and Polities’, in Lively, J. and Rees, J. (eds), Utilitarian Logic and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 122.Google Scholar

⁵ Berlin, I., ‘Equality’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56 (1955–1956), 314.Google Scholar

⁶ Gellner, E., ‘The Social Roots of Egalitarianism’, in Culture, Identity and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

⁷ What I have in mind is that some aspects of equality may be a precondition for the emergence of a market economy—for instance it is hard to see how a regime of free contract can work unless the contracting parties are all seen as bearers of the same set of basic personal and property rights. Although I draw attention to the influence of social practices on ideas, and cite Marx, I am very far from subscribing to any simple economic determinism.

⁸ Marx, K., Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 242.Google Scholar

⁹ Ibid., 246.

¹⁰ See my paper ‘Democracy and Social Justice’, British Journal of Political Science, 8 (1978), 1–19Google Scholar, reprinted in Birnbaum, P., Lively, J. and Parry, G. (eds), Democracy, Consensus and Social Contract (London: Sage, 1978).Google Scholar

¹¹ See Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar, esp. sections 12 and 48; Williams, B., ‘The Idea of Equality’, in Laslett, P. and Runciman, W. G. (eds), Philosophy, Politics and Society, second series (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964).Google Scholar

¹² Why does this answer seem intuitively obvious as a starting point? The argument for it is that egalitarian policies are a way of showing equal concern and respect for each individual (see for instance Dworkin, R., ‘Equality of Welfare’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10 (1981), 185–246Google Scholar and my own much briefer discussion in Social Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976)Google Scholar, Ch. 4, section 4). Since what ultimately matters to each indvidual is how well his life is going, i.e. his level of well-being, we manifest equal respect by ensuring that this level is as far as possible the same for everyone. (I do not now mean to endorse this argument—see my critical observations in ‘Arguments for Equality’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. VII (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982)Google Scholar—but it seems to capture best the intuitive appeal of equality of well-being.)

¹³ An interesting side question is whether one can recognize the significance of choice in this way without abandoning egalitarianism altogether. If we say that people should bear the costs and benefits of the choices they make about their use of resources, shouldn't we also respect the choices they make about the disposition of those resources? Musn't we allow departures from equality through gift, transfer, and so forth. In other words, if you allow that choices must count in the course of abandoning equality of welfare, don't you end up with Nozick? The brief answer to this is that the choices we have been discussing are private choices, in the sense of choices which affect only the welfare of the chooser and do not impinge upon the social allocation of rights and benefits. Nozick's trick is to disguise the social nature of other sorts of choice by concentrating on individual cases; for instance he talks about a particular A and a particular B exchanging services rather than about a general practice of exchange, with all its remoter effects (see Nozick, R., Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), esp. 160–4, 262–4Google Scholar). It would take us too far afield to expose the defects in Nozick's argument. My point here is that you can allow choice to have some significance without supposing, as libertarians do, that it must dominate all other considerations.

¹⁴ Dworkin, R., ‘Equality of Resources’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10 (1981), 289.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Dworkin attempts to distance his account from what he calls ‘the startinggate theory of fairness’. But he understands this as involving a Lockean theory of resource acquisition, and fails to notice that in a broader and more natural sense, his theory of equality of resources is also a starting-gate theory. For an analysis of this point, see Cohen, G. A., ‘Self-Ownership, World-Ownership and Equality: Part II’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 3 (1985–1986), 77–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, section IV.

¹⁶ I am thinking here of a system which allows full private ownership of resources, including virtually unlimited contractual rights (this is what Dworkin intends). If constraints are placed on the uses to which people may put the resources allocated to them, the conclusion will have to be modified. See my discussion in Market, State and Community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), Ch. 6.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Roemer, J., ‘Equality of Talent’, Economics and Philosophy, 1 (1985), 165.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ See the general discussion in Roemer, , ‘Equality of Talent’.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Dworkin, , ‘Equality of Resources’, sections V–VI.Google Scholar

²⁰ Arneson, R., ‘Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare’, Philosophical Studies, 54 (1988), 79–95Google Scholar; Cohen, G. A., ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, Ethics, 99 (1988–1989), 906–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²¹ Cohen, , ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, 921Google Scholar. In Arneson's case, the complexity is less apparent, but it can be brought out by considering the definition he offers of equal opportunity for welfare. ‘For equal opportunity for welfare to obtain among a number of persons, each must face an array of options that is equivalent to every other person's in terms of the prospects for preference satisfaction it offers’ (‘Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare’, 87Google Scholar). Should ‘prospects for preference satisfaction’ be assessed using each individual's own preferences, or using some standardized measure of preference satisfaction? If the former, how do we prevent expensive tastes from influencing the outcome? If the latter, how is the metric to be constructed given diversity of tastes among individuals?

²² Williams, , ‘The Idea of Equality’, 131.Google Scholar

²³ Walzer, M., Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983), 19.Google Scholar

²⁴ Walzer does of course recognize the importance of equal citizenship, but he does not perhaps stress sufficiently the central role it plays in the specification of an egalitarian society (though see his discussion of self-respect and self-ineesteem in Spheres of Justice, 272–80Google Scholar, where the connection is made). For Walzer, the political sphere has a special status chiefly because it is the means whereby we can preserve (or achieve) the separation of the other spheres of justice. My focus here is upon the symbolic importance of citizenship as the sphere in which the equality (or inequality, as the case may be) of people belonging to different social categories is publicly declared.

²⁵ In saying this, I might seem to be conceding that the different goods are commensurable after all, contrary to my earlier argument. This is not what I intend. The point is rather that our judgments of social standing generally invoke multiple criteria. When several criteria are brought into play, incommensurability means that no overall ranking is possible. But sometimes one criterion, such as wealth, appears to us so overwhelmingly salient that no other yardsticks are considered. This is a claim about the psychology of social status, not about the logic of assessment.

²⁶ There are, of course, some differences in distributive pattern within each group. My point is that the Old World does not systematically exhibit greater economic inequality than the New World. Estimates for the distribution of income only are given in Lydall, H., The Structure of Earnings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968)Google Scholar, Ch. 5. This picks out New Zealand and Australia as enjoying a particularly high degree of equality, but places Canada and the United States below the United Kingdom, West Germany and the Scandinavian countries in a middle group of moderately equal societies. France stands out among industrialized societies as exceptionally inegalitarian.

²⁷ Note, however, that in my account equality of status does require one simple form of equality, namely equal citizenship. This is properly construed as requiring an equal distribution (of rights, etc.) to everyone.