EQUALITY, LIBERTY'S LOST TWIN

A survey focuses on more than 200 years of political thought about equality.

As America’s wealth gap widens and the pressure builds to finally address its legacy of racial inequality, law professor Penegar raises a timely question. Has liberty been pursued at the expense of equality, making equality the “lost twin” of liberty? “Both ideals are important enough under our existing forms and traditions of government that they should be pursued or supported together,” he suggests in his brisk and often insightful survey that ranges from Rousseau to John Rawls. But “somehow Equality has been cut off from or less favored than Liberty.” As Penegar shows, Rousseau strove “for a greater depth of equality so intrinsically linked to liberty that they will advance together or falter in comparable measure.” The two concepts got equal billing in the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the founding documents of the American and French revolutions. But the word equality does not appear in the United States Constitution or the Bill of Rights and, of course, didn’t apply to the enslaved. In the mid-19th-century thoughts of Herbert Spencer, Penegar notes, equality “scarcely rises to the level of an ideal on the same plane as liberty” but “will come, when it comes, by dint of the force of social evolution.” The author deftly traces the theoretical strands up to the present day, touching on such thinkers as Henry George, who argued that financial capitalism was “destroying democracy by making economic equality impossible,” and Ronald Dworkin, who stressed that “equality does not have to bend its knee to liberty.” The book flounders a bit at times with repetitions and errors—British social reformer William Beveridge is rendered as “William Beverage.” Penegar is also occasionally given to overstatement. One wonders, for example, how much the British Labour Party’s victory in the 1945 election “extinguished a century’s worth of power arrangements favoring the traditions of land, finance and industry and the established leadership class made up of Etonians and Ox-bridge alumni” when Boris Johnson, an Old Etonian and Oxford alumnus, is now the country’s prime minister.

A political work that skillfully follows the threads that run from Rousseau to modern thinkers.