Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Were hunter-gatherer societies among the most equal in history?

What impact did the French and American revolutions have on the

concept of equality? And has that equality been on the retreat over the past three decades?

On today's episode, Darren M. McMahon, author of Equality, The History of an Illusive Idea,

talks to Spentism about humanity's enduring obsession with

egalitarianism. So in introduction to your book, you write that when people speak of equality,

they invariably speak of the equality of something, and that something can be most anything at all.

So given those words, what is equality? Is it something that defies definition?

Well, there's certainly lots of different kinds of equality, and of course, this is a slightly maddening thing in writing this book.

I mean, you can talk about equality of rights or the equality of religions or races or what have you. And so we always have to ask when we're thinking about equality, the equality of what and the equality for whom. This is a famous question put by the great economist, Mark Jassin. What is equality? Well, you know, this is the the thing that I'm puzzling in this book, and there are lots of different answers, but it's most basic. I mean, equality is simply a comparison between two or more things or objects, and we're trying to look for common characteristics that we can relate. One of the points that I always make is that equality is not identity. If two things are totally

alike, they're not equal, they're the same. So equal things are different in many ways,

but they share something together. And that's the question, the $100 question, equality of what?

But would you say is something that is hardwired into being human? I mean, have we always

pursued equality? Would equality have been something that meant something to say hunter-gathering societies?

Right. So I write quite a lot about hunter-gatherers. And of course, the simple answer there is that

we don't know because equality on some level is a

representational value and hunter-gathers, at least in the early period in the Paleolithic, don't

leave written records. But I would argue, and I do argue, that human beings are wired in different

ways. On the one hand, as I make a lot of, we're status creatures. We compare ourselves

to others and we're constantly jocking for a leg up. That's part of who we are. We don't often

like to talk about it, but it's there. But at the same time, and this is important in the direct

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