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Liberty and Equality

Liberty and Equality

Last updated on: October 20, 2014 at 5:55 am by Gene Veith

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Liberty and Equality 2014-10-19T18:16:09-04:00 Gene Veith

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In the times of the Greek democracy, the Roman republic, the American founding, and most of American history, liberty and equality were thought to go together. That changed, says Danielle Allen, author of a book on the Declaration of Independence

First, Karl Marx taught that individual liberty must be sacrificed for the greater goal of social equality. Then, in the Cold War, conservatives and libertarians taught the opposite, that equality must give way to individual liberty. Today, she says, Democrats are stressing the ideals of equality while Republicans are stressing the ideals of liberty. She argues that we need to recapture the sense in which the two go together, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence.

From Danielle Allen, Liberty, equality aren’t mutually exclusive – The Washington Post:

For millennia, political thinkers understood equality and liberty as concepts that provided mutual support. The ancient Athenians, who invented formal democracy, also conjured up the concepts of “equality before the law” and “an equal right to speak.” They opened political participation to all men regardless of economic status, while naming naval vessels things such as Eleutheria, or “Freedom.” The republican citizenry of ancient Rome conducted its politics under the banner of “equal liberty” and celebrated a mixed constitution that, as Cicero wrote, had “enough power in the magistracies, enough authority in the advice given by leading citizens, and enough liberty in the people.” For a time, that mixed constitution brought “equality,” “something free men are hardly able to do without for very long,” as he put it. The United States’ founding similarly drew liberty and equality together. In Abraham Lincoln’s formulation, the new nation was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” . . .

In the “Communist Manifesto” of 1848 Marx wrote: “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state . . . . Of course, in the beginning this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property and on the conditions of bourgeois production.” Over half a century, the question of the meaning of equality and its connection to liberty came to turn entirely around a definition understood to require the equalization of property through forceful re-appropriation.

In this country, as the argument against socialism and communism gathered force, the battle was explicitly cast as a contest between equality and liberty by thinkers such as William Graham Sumner, the late 19th-century chair of political economy at Yale University. He wrote in an argument against socialism: “Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest.”

By the Cold War, both communists and libertarians structured their ideas, to an important degree, around the tenet that there is “an Eternal Conflict” between liberty and equality, to quote the title of a 1960 article from the Freeman, a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education. Iconic thinkers on the right adopted the theme and built economic theories around it: Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. But liberals and thinkers on the left — Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin — also assumed a basic opposition between liberty and equality, even if they sought to undo it.

The stakes of this conceptual error are significant. We might, for instance, view our partisan gridlock as the sad result of a conceptual error applied over long duration. The Democratic Party, which now wears the mantle of equality — if any party does — thinks it cannot in a full-throated way befriend liberty. The Republican Party, which wants to style itself the party of liberty, thinks it can give no quarter to equality. But these ideals belong together like hand and glove. If the command economy was an extreme political form, so too is the libertarian counter-vision.

It’s now 25 years since the Berlin Wall fell — long past time, in other words, to dismantle the second wall established by a putative opposition between liberty and equality. We are overdue for a return to the task of ascertaining how those two concepts work in tandem, and what institutional forms can best sustain them as the twinned ideals that they are.

Our own political tradition gives us the resources for doing that, beginning with the Declaration of Independence. I would urge us all to renew our education there, diving afresh into the meaning of equality, and discovering just how it can live harmoniously with liberty.

The issue for much of history has not been equality of wealth–which is the issue for Marx and today’s left–but social equality. That is, the equality before the law and in the eyes of the culture of people of different social classes. An “ordinary” citizen was to have the same value as citizens of higher social status. The enemy was “elitism.” America was to be a “classless society,” as compared to the elaborate social hierarchies of Europe, though social status keeps becoming an issue, whether based on wealth, education, connectedness, celebrity, or (as in groups of adolescence) “coolness.” Social conservatives array themselves against the “cultural elite.” The tea parties are against “political elites,” as well as big corporations and “Wall Street.” The “Occupy” leftists share that economic populism in their opposition to the “1%,” but they often share the trendiness of cultural elitism.

So what would a broad recommitment to liberty and equality look like?

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