Equality

The second pillar is that of equality. Historically liberty and equality are seen in American politics as having existed in tension with each other, and this tension has sometimes been offered as a descriptor of the perceivable tension between liberals and conservatives, even though liberty as a central focus is a libertarian, rather than a liberal or conservative, view.  The 20^th Century Liberal, with his concern for equal representation of underprivileged populations, social welfare for all, indeed the springboard for the New Deal, the Great Society, and the Civil Rights movement, appears to have a concern for equality, either of opportunity or result, that writers such as Alexis de Tocqueville described as preferred by the democratic man, more so even than his liberty (Democracy in America II.2.1).  It is perhaps more fitting to refer to a 20^th and early 21^st Century Liberal as an egalitarian, for the term liberal has its origins in the name liberty, and as one may see in Franklin Roosevelt’s rhetoric, freedom for the liberal is only available through equality:

An old English judge once said: “Necessitous men are not free men.” Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality.  A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives.  For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.  (Roosevelt, Renomination Acceptance Speech 27 June 1936.)

The political equality to which Roosevelt refers, of course, is a recognition of a fundamental  equality which the Declaration of Independence describes as one of the "self-evident truths" of human nature, yet Roosevelt's treatment of equality resonates more clearly with the ideas of 19^th Century liberal Thomas Hill Green.  A champion of public education and the reform of British labor laws, Green emphasized equality, especially equality of opportunity, for the sake of greater liberty. (Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation) Green is generally described as the founder of welfare liberalism, and his sentiments are echoed in America among 19^th Century Progressives in addition to political figures in the 20^th Century such as Roosevelt,  John Dewey, and Lyndon Johnson. 

Dewey’s ideology of liberalism is perhaps most evident in his Liberalism and Social Action (1935), where he develops Green’s linkage between liberty and equality in what Dewey himself admits is a “radical” direction, whereby “the liberty of individuals will be supported by the very structure of economic organization”:

The ultimate goal of economic organization in human life is to assure the secure basis for an ordered expression of individual capacity and for the satisfaction of the needs of man in non-economic directions.  The effort of mankind in connection with material production belongs…among interests and activities that are…routine in character…Needs, wants, and desires are always the moving force in generating creative action.  When these wants are compelled by force of conditions to be directed for the most part, among the mass of mankind, into obtaining means of subsistence, what should be a means becomes perforce an end in itself…Humanly speaking, I do not see how it would have been possible to avoid an epoch having this character.  But its perpetuation is the cause of the continually growing social chaos and strife.  Its termination…can be brought about by organized social reconstruction that puts the results of the mechanism of abundance at the free disposal of individuals. (Dewey 62)

Effectively Dewey argues for organized collective social action as a means to eliminate the conflict that arises from inequalities in material possessions. Through this “method of intelligence,” human beings may be freed from subsistence to pursue other aims.  Therefore liberty is here conceived as a product of a radical equality brought about by the liberation from material need in a world of plenty.  Lyndon Johnson, in his “Great Society” speech at the University of Michigan in 1964, reflects an attachment to Dewey’s argument in phrases like “The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all,” and “We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world,” presumably to organize intelligent social action in order to realize the Great Society (Johnson, Remarks at U.Mich. 22 May 1964).  More recently, the late John Rawls generally casts justice in the light of equality as a kind of “fairness”—that “all social primary goods—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favored.” (Rawls, A Theory of Justice, ref. in Dionne 271) In each case, equality trumps simple liberty as Tocqueville suggests, and is offered as a means toward a kind of liberty that an 18^th or early 19^th Century thinker may find difficult to discern.