10. Equality¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 10: Equality¶
Herr Dühring’s method for constructing morality, law, and history is a revival of the old a priori approach: he dissects objects of knowledge into their simplest elements, applies self-evident axioms, and claims mathematical certainty for the results. In practice, this means fabricating the concept of an object from the object itself, then measuring the object against its own reflection. When an ideologist builds morality from the concept of “society” rather than from real social relations, the material is drawn from the meagre residue of abstractions and the content of his own consciousness—which, inevitably, reflects the social and political relations of his day.
Dühring’s foundational axiom is that the simplest society consists of at least two people, and that two human wills are, as such, entirely equal. This is a gross exaggeration: two people may be unequal in sex, and the simplest social unit is a man and a woman founding a family. Dühring’s two men are not his discovery but belong to the whole eighteenth century; his originality lies in elevating this illustrative device into the basic method for all social science. To establish absolute equality, the two men must be stripped of all reality, leaving only the concept “human being”—making them complete phantoms. The axiomatics then collapse. Rousseau used the same two men to prove the opposite: on a desert island, one will’s determination and energy will soon impose itself on the other, even if formally voluntary. Dühring is forced into a series of retreats—permitting dependence for children, moral inequality for those with a “streak of the beast,” and mental inequality justifying force as “equalisation.”
The historical development of the idea of equality tells a different story. Christianity recognised only one equality: all were equally born in original sin, fitting its character as a religion of slaves and the oppressed. The Germanic invasions abolished ideas of equality for centuries, building an unprecedented social hierarchy, yet simultaneously creating a compact cultural area of national states that prepared the ground for later questions of equal rights. The feudal Middle Ages generated the bourgeoisie, which developed handicraft industry and exchange. The great maritime discoveries and influx of American gold and silver disintegrated feudal society; manufacture replaced handicraft. Large-scale trade requires free, equal owners of commodities; the transition to manufacture requires free workers able to contract as equals. The law of value expressed the equality of human labour unconsciously. Political systems opposed these economic requirements with guild restrictions and privileges. The demand for liberation from feudal fetters, for equality of rights, necessarily extended to the peasantry and demanded abolition of noble privileges, becoming a general demand for human rights. Significantly, the American constitution first recognised the rights of man while confirming racial slavery. Bourgeois demands for equality were always accompanied by proletarian demands—first in religious form, then drawing on bourgeois theories, demanding real social and economic equality. The proletarian demand for equality has a double meaning: either a spontaneous revolutionary reaction against social inequalities, or a more far-reaching demand derived from bourgeois equality itself. In both cases, its real content is the abolition of classes; any demand beyond that passes into absurdity. The idea of equality is a historical product, not an eternal truth.