Equality on the march: an American historian talks about equality
Why no civilized human society has been able to achieve real equality is a question that historians, philosophers, sociologists and other scientists have been puzzling over for centuries. Another attempt to understand the issue is in front of us. Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week specifically for Izvestia.
Darrin McMahon
"Equality: from hunter-gatherers to totalitarian regimes"
Moscow: AST Publishing House, 2026. — translated from English by Alexey Smolyak — 432 p.
Darrin McMahon, a professor of history at Dartmouth College, begins his book on equality, written in 2023, with a description of the psychological effect, which in itself says a lot about the perception of the stated topic by the mass consciousness — as does the title of the introduction, "Imaginary Equality." In it, the author tells how many people who knew what kind of research he was working on automatically replaced the concept of "equality" with the opposite in conversations with him, assuring them that they were looking forward to a book about inequality. "In Sweden, the organizers of my lecture even changed its title from "Reflections on the History of Equality" to "Reflections on the History of Inequality," McMahon writes, slightly ironically.: "We live in a time when it is difficult even for Swedes to imagine equality, let alone realize it."
Specifically, the Swedish model of the welfare state, popular in the middle of the last century and aimed at overcoming wealth inequality, remains outside the scope of the book, although some Swedish thinkers are mentioned in it. For example, the theologian Anders Nygren, from whose treatise "Agape and Eros" (1953) Martin Luther King drew and placed at the center of his concept of morality the concept of "agape" — the selfless love of Christ, acting as the main creative force in the universe. In the context of equality, agape was important to King because such love does not discriminate between worthy and unworthy, between friends and enemies, and because, as King hoped, it would not only restore dignity to people of color, but also heal a white person whose personality is distorted by segregation: "A negro must love a white person." because a white man needs his love to relieve himself of tension, insecurity and fear."
All this looks great in words and probably sounded very inspiring in King's sermons, but this fighter for civil rights appears only in the last chapter of McMahon's book, which ends with cautious arguments that it is not yet clear how equality will be understood in the near future and whether it is possible to overcome the eternal incompatibility of equality and individuality. By this final chord, the author of the book has already conducted a detailed tour of a rather sad "museum" for the reader, where humanity's attempts to keep up with such a tempting dream as equality are on display. The unrealizability of this ideal, however, is already embedded in the book's original subtitle, The History of an Elusive Idea. On the other hand, it's the elusiveness of equality that makes it so appealing."..Over and over again, people use the concept of "equality" with seductive vagueness, gesturing to its multiple meanings and meanings, but at the same time obscuring or hiding the contradictions associated with it, McMahon explains the resilience and power of elusive equality. —Each epoch constructs the image of equality in its own image and likeness, creating and remaking it anew."
It is not surprising that equality exists only in conjunction with inequality, and it would be more accurate to define McMahon's research as a history of the inescapable dialectic of equality and inequality. This is done in one of the laudatory reviews preceding the book by the Dutch political scientist Sip Stuurman, who emphasizes one of the main thoughts of the American historian: "Concepts of equality can be used both to expand the community of equals and to deprive certain categories of people of equality." McMahon traces how throughout the history of mankind, equality exists in tension between two poles, on the one hand, meaning equality of individuals endowed with the same rights but different from each other, and on the other, "equality in the sense of sameness," when "homogeneity prevails over heterogeneity, and individual diversity is erased."
The situation with equality looked more favorable in the prehistoric hunter-gatherer society, where there were healthy and effective mechanisms for combating "upstarts" striving for leadership and dominance. McMahon refers to Canadian anthropologist Richard B. Lee, in his study on the Kungah, a Bushman tribe from the Kalahari Desert, who described the witty practice of "insulting meat" in his own way: "Every time a hunter from a group killed an animal while hunting, the rest of the group belittled his achievement, ridiculing the hunter and his pitiful prey, even (and especially) if it was large. Kung, the author's interlocutor, explained the reason behind this.: "When a young man kills a lot of meat, he begins to consider himself a leader or a bigman, and considers the rest as his servants or someone worse than him. We don't allow that. That's why we always say that his meat is useless. This is how we cool his heart and make it softer."
However, by switching from gathering to farming, humanity may have made the main mistake of burying the idea of equality as utopian. A small percentage of those who could benefit from the yield of the land, McMahon writes, received enormous benefits: "They used them to erect the wonders of civilization that still stand in many parts of the world. But the vast majority of these benefits were available less and less."
With the further development of civilization, ways to ensure equality were already much less humorous than the Bushman's "insult to meat", and more often took tragic and bloody forms, eventually turning into new ugly hypostases of inequality, as follows from the chapters of the book on the French Revolution, the fascist theory of equality as a homogeneous national and racial "substance" or Marxism, whose attitude to equality was not at all unambiguous: "... in fact, both Marx and Friedrich Engels were much more critical of equality and the politics of egalitarianism than is commonly believed. Their criticism helped shape the policies of two of the most influential readers, V.I. Lenin and I. V. Stalin, who went out of their way to expose the "concept of equality" as "the stupidest and most absurd prejudice." Striving, on the one hand, to protect their people from "gross equalization" and "empty talk about equality," on the other hand, they forcibly eradicated differences and dissent."
In general, the best thing in the history of civilization is that humanity, in its quest for equality, has learned to exclude the unequal from its environment — this is about the main dialectical conclusion from McMahon's book. One of his important psychological goals is to show that human feelings about equality are more contradictory than an individual is usually willing to admit. The fundamentally ambivalent attitude of man towards equality as a being of status by definition, prone to forming hierarchies in any group, becomes a cross-cutting theme of the book: "We want to be treated fairly, as equals, to be recognized and respected. But at the same time, we strive to be different, we want to stand out. We are extremely inclined to swear allegiance to those who have distinguished themselves most successfully, especially when it turns (or seems to turn) to our advantage."
Reflecting in the final chapter of "The Dream" on how much the course of history and the process of human equality coincide in principle, the historian recognizes that progress is completely different from the spread of equality, and "the long-standing tension between difference and sameness" is now bursting to the surface again, exposing "fault lines all over the world, which have only worsened in as a result of the shocking return of income and wealth inequality in the last few decades." Nevertheless, it is also completely unbearable to completely abandon such a soul-warming abstract ideal as equality, therefore, McMahon comforts, one can only rejoice at some of his situational glimpses at one time or another in one circumstance or another: "What we once saw as a destination on the horizon is now possible. It turns out to be a mirage. However, it is easier for us to consider equality not as a natural goal, but as a contingent historical creation, which it is."
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