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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Every age seems to have some dominating central idea, and every particular political system surely has some dominating central idea from which radiate all the institutions, processes, and the texture of life in that country. As Tocqueville long ago said, the dominating idea of our age, and of our political order in particular, is the idea of equality. Equality is therefore at once for us the source of our political benefits and also the source of our defects and dangers. That is to say, every dominating idea is the one that determines for the society its likeliest and greatest benefits and dangers, because the central idea is the one that can do the greatest and most pervasive good and by the same token also the greatest harm. Equality is for us that central principle, the one we have to grapple with and wrest good from, and likewise the principle from which come our greatest dangers. Equality is the political problem for mankind in the present age.
page 329 note * One example of this reasoning, as it applies to unequal property outcomes, is to be found in Federalist 10. From the protection by government of “different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results”. Freedom to exert unequal capacities necessarily results in unequal outcomes. This passage, by the way, is not protective of existing patterns of wealth distribution as it may appear to some contemporary readers. Madison is in fact concerned not to protect established wealth as such, but rather the process by which the “faculties” continuously receive their due outcome.
page 331 note * Both Irving Kristol and Peter Berger have recently suggested shrewdly that the intellectual champions of egalitarianism may well have, or think themselves to have, quite material stakes in the movement toward egalitarianism.
