Nonintrinsic Egalitarianism, from Hobbes to Rousseau
Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: The recent, crisp articulation of “nonintrinsic egalitarianism” emerged out of the critique of the influential distinction between “telic’’ and “deontic” egalitarianisms. Part of the promise of this approach is that it can be deployed in order to reintegrate these recent philosophical debates about equality with much older currents in the history of political thought. The article explains how the century of argument in England and France after 1650 created the intellectual space for the kind of presentation of nonintrinsic egalitarian ideas such as we find in Rousseau’s major political writings from the 1750s onward. In so doing, the article illustrates the striking extent to which fundamental political-theoretical disagreements are often driven not so much by competing normative commitments as by divergent understandings of how those commitments ramify through the sociological and institutional possibilities that disputants imagine are plausibly open to them.
Source: The Journal of Politics
DOI: 10.1086/708502
Author: Christopher Brooke
Institution: University of Cambridge
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2989893372