Nature and Equality

Norberto Bobbio (Left and Right) claims that left and right are different because of their different evaluations of equality. He starts from the uncontroversial fact that people are equal in certain respects, unequal in others, and claims that “We can then correctly define as egalitarians those who , while not ignoring the fact that people are both equal and unequal, believe that what they have in common has greater value in the formation of a good community . Conversely , those who are not egalitarian, while starting from the same premiss, believe that their diversity has greater value in the formation of a good community” (66-7).

And this conflict of fundamental choices “characterizes so well the opposing camps which for a long time we have been in the habit of calling left and right : on the one hand, people who believe that human beings are more equal than unequal, and on the other, people who believe that we are more unequal than equal.”

Overlaying this opposition is a different evaluation of the relative roles of social and natural equality and inequality. Bobbio cites Rousseau and Nietzsche as exemplars of this difference: “In his Discourse on the Origin of the Inequality among Men, Rousseau argues from the premiss that men are born equal but are made unequal by civil society, that it is the society which slowly imposes itself on the state of nature through the development of the division of labour. Conversely, Nietzsche works on the premiss that men are by nature born unequal (and this is a good thing because, among other things, a society founded on slavery as in ancient Greece was a highly developed society precisely because it had slaves), and that only a society with a herd morality and a religion based on compassion and submissiveness could make them equal. Just as Rousseau saw inequality as artificial, and therefore to be condemned and abolished for contradicting the fundamental equality of nature, so Nietzsche saw equality as artificial, and therefore to be abhorred for contradicting the beneficent inequality which nature desired for humanity” (67-8).

As Bobbio says, “the difference could not be starker,” yet at the same time, the similarity is pretty stark too: Both take nature as normative; they simply have different conclusions about the nature of nature. And insofar as they are taking nature as normative, they are conversely treating social artifice as un-normative. And in that, they are both assuming that the realm of the made is arbitrary; both assume that the socially constructed is merely socially constructed. That’s where the debate over equality should focus: Not, or not only, about the nature of nature, but about the normativity of artifice, of poiesis.