Pierre Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2013, 364 pp, hb £25.95.
| Published date | 01 September 2015 |
| Date | 01 September 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12150 |
| Author | William Lucy |
Pierre Rosanvallon,The Society of Equals, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 2013, 364 pp, hb £25.95.
Two questions have plagued Anglophone analytical philosophy. One, pressed
for as long as this style of philosophy has been practised, concerns the history of
the discipline itself and of its principal ideas. The question – why is this form of
philosophy seemingly completely ignorant of philosophy’s past? – contains a
barely hidden rebuke: any respectable approach to the discipline must be his-
torically informed. Any ‘escape from history’ (R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror
of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979) 9) serves, it seems, as
an escape from the possibility that ‘investigations of the foundations of knowl-
edge or morality or society may be simply apologetics, attempts to eternalize a
certain contemporary language-game, social practice, or self-image’ (ibid, 9–10).
The other question is narrower – being directed to relatively recent work in
the political-philosophical wing of Anglophone analytical philosophy – but no
less critical in intent: how is it that much contemporary political philosophy is so
abstract and so isolated from the ordinary problems of collective life? So, for
example, it is often noted that, as some contemporary political philosophers (luck
egalitarians) have become ever more preoccupied with debating what, exactly,
egalitarians are committed to distributing equally, and dreaming up ever more
elaborate thought-experiments and counter-examples with which to test and
forward their respective proposals, inequality has increased dramatically in the
Western democracies. Not only does the work of these philosophers have
nothing to say about this, it also seems to have nothing to say about why equality
should be regarded as a value worth attempting to achieve in the first place. Luck
egalitarianism’s preoccupation with (i) what is to be distributed (welfare,
resources, life partners, good looks, psychological dispositions?) and (ii) what
should be regarded as a disadvantage that must be redressed (lack of resources or
welfare, ill-health and physical impairment, expensive tastes, grouchiness, envy?)
led one critic to suggest that this position could have been dreamt up by enemies
of egalitarianism seeking to embarrass those who march under that banner (E.
Anderson, ‘What is the Point of Equality?’ (1999) 109 Ethics 287).
Pierre Rosanvallon’s The Society of Equals contains admirably clear responses to
both questions, although neither explicitly figures in the book. The first four
chapters provide a superb historical conspectus of equality’s political and philo-
sophical life in France, Britain and the USA, from its ‘invention’ in 1789 as a
‘visceral rejection of privilege’ (12) to its near death now, in ‘the Age of the
Second Globalization’ (209). This ‘spectacular reversal’ (ibid) of equality’s politi-
cal fortune is only one of the remarkable transformations equality has undergone
since 1789 and which Rosanvallon expertly charts. That charting details equal-
ity’s life and development along two, often very closely related dimensions: in
the political disputes and practical politics of France, Britain and the USA and in
the intellectual-cum-philosophical life of those countries.
As a matter of both politics and philosophy, the period from the mid-18th until
the mid-19th century was remarkable, marking equality’s birth as a concept
diametrically opposed to entrenched aristocratic privilege. In both France and
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© 2015 The Author. The Modern Law Review © 2015 The Modern Law Review Limited.
894 (2015) 78(5) MLR 883–911
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