McMahon Darrin M. Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea

Basic Books, 2023. — 549 p. — ISBN 9780465093946.Equality is in crisis. Our world is filled with soaring inequalities, spanning wealth, race, identity, and nationality. Yet how can we strive for equality if we don’t understand it? As much as we have struggled for equality, we have always been profoundly skeptical about it. How much do we want, and for whom? Darrin M. McMahon’s Equality is the definitive intellectual history, tracing equality’s global origins and spread from the dawn of humanity through the Enlightenment to today. Equality has been reimagined continually, in the great world religions and the politics of the ancient world, by revolutionaries and socialists, Nazis and fascists, and postwar reformers and activists. A magisterial exploration of why equality matters and why we continue to reimagine it, Equality offers all the tools to rethink equality anew for our own age.Epigraph
Introduction: Imaginary Equality
The Deep History of Equality
The Human Surrender to Slavery and Exploitation
The Invention of Equality in the Axial Age
The Equality of Equals in Ancient Greece
Christian Equality and the Image of the Trinity
The Reinvention of Equality in the Age of Enlightenment
The Scythe of Equality and the French Revolution
From Each According to Ability, to Each According to Need
The Equality of the Volk
Sovereign Equality and the Peoples of the World
The Guiding Hand of Equality and the Moral Arc of the Universe
Conclusion: The Crisis of Equality