capitalism

Equality 155
In fact, the Levellers were opposed to any kind of
egalitarian socialism. While defending private property,
based on the natural right of self-proprietorship, they
rejected the doctrine that substantial property holders—
especially in land—should enjoy special political rights.
As Colonel Rainborough put it during the “Putney
debates,” a public exchange between the Levellers and
Cromwellians: “For I really think that the poorest he that
is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he . . . that
the poorest man in England is not at all bound in strict
sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to
put himself under.”
The most influential statement of what later became the
libertarian theory of equal rights appeared in John Locke’s
Second Treatise of Government. According to Locke, “all
Men are by Nature equal.” The state of nature (that “State
all Men are naturally in”) is not only a “State of perfect
freedom,” but “a State also of Equality, wherein all the
Power and Jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more
than another. . . .” The most fundamental among these
equal rights is the right of every individual “to his own
Person, which no other man has power over, but the free
Disposal of it lies in himself.”
The import of Locke’s notion of equal rights may be
described as political reductionism. This theory states that
all rights and powers claimed by government must ultimately
be reducible to the equal rights and legitimate powers
of individuals as they would exist in a state of nature.
Equal rights can be transferred, delegated, or alienated only
through consent, according to Locke. Therefore, no person
can lay claim to a natural privilege of sovereignty, which
supposedly entitles him or her to rule others without their
consent. Nor (as Samuel Pufendorf and others had argued)
can a government lay claim to special rights that no individual
could possibly possess.
Locke’s theory of equal rights had radical implications
that would later manifest themselves in the American and
French Revolutions. But even critics of these revolutionary
tendencies would often defend some version of equal freedom
with a distinctively Lockean flavor. For example,
according to Edmund Burke,
[Social] liberty ...is that state of things in which liberty
is secured by the equality of restraint. A constitution of
things in which the liberty of no one man, and no body of
men, and no number of men, can find means to trespass on
the liberty of any person, or any description of persons, in
the society.
Similarly, Immanuel Kant, after defining freedom as
“independence from the constraint of another’s will,” argued
that authentic freedom must be “compatible with the freedom
of everyone else in accordance with a universal law.”
This idea received one of its most influential formulations
in Herbert Spencer’s “Law of Equal Freedom” (in
Social Statics, 1851). According to Spencer, “Every man
has freedom to do all he wills, provided he infringes not the
equal freedom of any other man.” The “freedom of each
must be bounded by the similar freedom of all,” and “every
man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties
compatible with the possession of like liberty by every
other man.”
This approach to equal rights stands in stark contrast to
various doctrines of egalitarianism as this term is commonly
understood. For instance, in Power and Market
(1970), the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard argues
that “the diversity of mankind is a basic postulate of our
knowledge of human beings,” so “it can be shown that
equality of income is an impossible goal for mankind.”
Egalitarianism is “a literally senseless social philosophy.”
Another libertarian critique of egalitarianism, one that
has profoundly influenced the course of contemporary
political theory, appears in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State,
and Utopia (1974). Nozick criticizes “welfare economics”
and other theories of egalitarianism that are defended in the
name of “distributive justice,” defending instead what he
calls an “entitlement theory” of justice.
A libertarian theory of justice is not patterned or coercively
imposed according to some notion of end results.
According to Nozick, the “entitlement theory of justice in
distribution is historical; whether a distribution is just
depends upon how it came about.” If property titles were
originally acquired by just means and if they have since been
transferred voluntarily, then the resulting state of affairs is
just even if it does not conform to the moral ideal of social
planners. Hence, “The entitlement conception of justice in
holdings makes no presumption in favor of [material] equality,
or any other overall end state or patterning. It cannot
merely be assumed that equality must be built into any theory
of justice.”
See also Epicureanism; Levellers; Locke, John; Nozick, Robert;
Rawls, John; Stoicism
Further Readings
GHS
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On Duties. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins,
eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Peter Laslett,
ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Lucretius. On the Nature of Things. Frank O. Copley, trans. New
York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic
Books, 1974.
Rothbard, Murray. Power and Market. Kansas City, MO: Sheed
Andrews & McMeel, 1970.
Sharp, Andrew, ed. The English Levellers. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998.
Spencer, Herbert. Social Statics. London: Chapman, 1851.