From the Introduction

The idea of equality has pervaded the history of the West for twenty-five centuries and has become one of its distinctive features. The first appearance of the concept is linked to the establishment of politics as a specific form of public space in the “polis”. Yet right from the beginning equality sought a different justification outside politics: and it found one in a naturalistic argument. We are equal because human beings are made equal “by nature”. But in antiquity the same recourse to nature served an opposite purpose - justifying the origin of inequalities: human beings, far from being equal, are “by nature” born unequal. The modern world inherited the force of the link between equality/inequality and nature, maintaining its ambivalence.
The nineteenth century and the first three quarters of the twentieth century were the great laboratories of modern equality. Western modernity, from the American and French Revolutions onwards, created two models of equality, both of them products of the Industrial Revolution and of Enlightenment culture: the first was European, and was developed by the socialist tradition; the second was the American one magisterially described by Tocqueville.
The end of the classical industrial world, as a result of the technological advances of the last thirty years, has destroyed the social, economic, and cultural bases of both these models. The global economy has reduced world poverty, but is creating previously unknown imbalances.
How much equality does a democracy need in order to function without betraying itself? This question, of great present-day importance, in fact dates back to the political thought of the Greeks, who invented democracy but were unable to provide an answer to the most important question it posed.
There certainly is a problem of quantity, or redistribution: inequality in the amounts of wealth available to each person. But there is also another form of inequality, which is spreading throughout the West, an inequality which is not quantitative, nor related to the abstract enjoyment of political rights, but qualitative, concerning citizenship and civil life. This kind of inequality is incompatible with democracy.
The time has come to shift our thinking about equality and make a genuine change of paradigm. We must build a new model, capable of dealing with the challenges of the technological revolution and projecting itself as a global form, potentially open to the entire planet.

«A bold, original book—learned without ever being pedantic, engaging without being frivolous, highly personal without ever being self-referential. It takes the reader through a vast body of European literature without ever losing its way. In the end, the reader will come away with far deeper, more nuanced understanding of what ‘equality’ has come to mean over the centuries, what it should mean for us today, and what its possible future might be». Anthony Pagden, author of The Pursuit of Europe

«Schiavone displays here extraordinary historic, legal, and philosophical knowledge, enabling him to cover the full span of Western history with great erudition». Roberto Esposito, author of Politics and Negation

«The Pursuit of Equality in the West is one of the most richly detailed, original, and thought-provoking books I have ever read. Only Aldo Schiavone could have given us such a lucid and cogent study». Massimo Ciavolella, University of California, Los Angeles

English translation: Harvard UP, 2020
French translation: Fayard, 2020