Equality

The conservative is sometimes pictured as the opponent of equality. The picture mistakes a specific position for a general one. The tradition that produced the American founding, the gradual extension of the franchise in nineteenth-century Britain, and the Catholic social teaching on the dignity of the worker has accepted the basic moral equality of persons as a settled premise. What the tradition has resisted is the conflation of this moral equality with the equality of social, economic, or cultural condition, and the use of state power to enforce the latter on the assumption that it follows from the former.

What the conservative defends is a distinction: between the equality that belongs to persons as bearers of moral worth and as citizens before the law, and the inequality that follows from the unequal exercise of liberty within a free society.

Key takeaways

• Equality, in the conservative tradition, is a moral and legal concept — equal dignity, equal standing before the law — rather than a sociological condition to be engineered by the state through the redistribution of material outcomes.
• The tradition distinguishes the equality conservatives accept (equality of moral worth, equality before the law, equality of basic political rights) from the equality conservatives contest (equality of outcome, equality of social condition, equality enforced against the grain of unequal capacities and choices).
• Conservative caution about egalitarian projects rests less on hostility to the poor than on the historical record of what large-scale efforts to equalise social condition have required: extensive coercion, suppression of intermediate institutions, and the erosion of the distinctions on which human society has always rested.

History and context

The egalitarian tradition in Western political thought has two main streams. The first, rooted in Christian theology and the Stoic recognition of a shared human nature, holds that all persons are equal in their moral standing — bearers of an inherent dignity that the political community must recognise. This conviction was carried into modern political thought through the natural-law tradition, the English common law’s protections of person and property, and the American Declaration’s assertion that all men are created equal in the relevant sense.

The second stream emerged from the French Revolution and the radical egalitarianism of writers such as Gracchus Babeuf, who pressed equality beyond legal standing into the equalisation of property and social condition. The nineteenth-century socialist tradition, from Proudhon and Marx through the Fabian Society and the Second International, developed this stream into the systematic critique of bourgeois inequality and the demand for collective ownership of productive resources.

Conservative engagement with equality begins with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which distinguished the English settlement of 1688 — extending liberties under existing constitutional forms — from the French project of remaking society according to abstract principles of equality. Burke’s argument was not that men were unequal in moral worth but that the abstract demand for equality, applied to the concrete inequalities of any actual society, would require coercion on a scale incompatible with the liberties it claimed to defend.¹

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835–1840) supplied the most penetrating nineteenth-century analysis of the democratic passion for equality. Tocqueville observed that the democratic age would be marked by an inexorable equalisation of conditions, and that the central political question of the age would be whether this equality could be reconciled with liberty or would degenerate into the soft despotism of a centralised state administering equal subjection.² His diagnosis structured subsequent conservative thinking about democratic equality.

The twentieth century saw the egalitarian project move from socialist economic equalisation to broader cultural and social equalisation under the banner of equality of outcome. The American conservative response was articulated by Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (1960) and Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973–1979), which argued that equality before the law was incompatible with equality of outcome: that the former required treating persons by identical rules, while the latter required treating them differently to compensate for the differential results those rules produced.³ Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) supplied the libertarian variant of the argument, holding that any pattern of equality could be maintained only through continuous interference with the free transactions of individuals.

Roger Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) developed the cultural critique: that the egalitarian project, having moved from economic to cultural domains, had come to require the suppression of the inherited distinctions — of family, religion, custom, and judgement — through which actual societies had distinguished higher from lower, better from worse, and within which alone the moral life had been possible.⁴

The conservative position

Three claims structure the tradition.

First, moral equality is the foundation. The conservative accepts without reservation the equal moral worth of persons — a conviction the tradition inherited from Christian anthropology and from natural-law thinking about the rational nature shared by all human beings. This moral equality is the ground of the prohibitions against murder, theft, and arbitrary subjection that the conservative tradition has defended as the core of the moral law.

Second, legal equality follows from moral equality. The proper political expression of moral equality is equality before the law: the requirement that the rules of the political community apply identically to all its members, without regard to rank, wealth, religion, or ancestry. This is what Hayek called the rule of law in its full sense, and the conservative tradition has defended it as the principal political achievement of the modern Western order.

Third, equality of outcome is incompatible with both liberty and legal equality. The conservative reading holds that any sustained effort to equalise social or economic outcomes requires treating persons differently — taking more from some, giving more to others, on the basis of categorical judgements that themselves violate the principle of legal equality. The historical record of such efforts, from the Jacobin Terror to twentieth-century communism, is the conservative’s principal evidence that the project is not only conceptually flawed but practically dangerous.

Differing positions

The egalitarian liberal position, developed in its most systematic form by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971), accepts that inequalities are permissible only when they work to the benefit of the least advantaged.⁵ Rawls’s difference principle has provided the philosophical framework for most contemporary egalitarian thought, including the work of Ronald Dworkin, G.A. Cohen, and the broader analytic egalitarian school. The conservative reply concedes the moral seriousness of the Rawlsian project but contests both its anthropology — the original-position abstraction strips persons of the attachments through which they actually live — and its policy consequences, which require an administrative apparatus the conservative regards as incompatible with the freedoms it would defend.

The socialist position holds that the conservative defence of legal equality without material equality leaves the formal liberties of the poor without the substantive content that would make them effective, and that conservative criticism of egalitarian projects effectively defends existing distributions of power and wealth. The conservative reply is that the alternative — concentrating in the state the power needed to redistribute systematically — has historically produced more concentrated power and less equality, not more.

The classical-liberal position is closest to the conservative position on this question but is generally more confident than conservatives that markets alone will produce both liberty and acceptable patterns of inequality. The conservative reading is more attentive than the classical liberal to the role of intermediate institutions — family, church, voluntary association — in mitigating inequalities the market itself does not address.

References

1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Dodsley, 1790), particularly the sections on the rights of men and the metaphysical abstractions of the Revolution.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 [1835/1840]), Volume II, Part IV.
3. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), chapters 6 and 9; Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
4. Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), chapter 7.
5. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).