Alexis de Tocqueville is as close to a civic profit as we have.

And in the 1830s, he taught that equality will be the conquering dogma of the Democratic age.

He was right.

Very few people enjoy public legitimacy in Democratic

America if their argument is advanced in the name of inequality. Who favors that? But even if,

rhetorically, the left and the right each favor the idea of equality, it doesn't take long

to see that by the term equality they mean different things. There's the equality of opportunity

favored by the freedom-loving right. And there's the equality of ends favored by the left. There is

something called equity, which obviously shares some aspect of equality, but also would seem to

instantiate inequality in practice. The meaning of equality is itself a matter of some dispute,

and that should not be surprising when you think of it, because equality is a term of comparison. Two things,

or two persons, are equal in reference to what? Not their height, or their ability to play the trumpet,

or their intellectual capacities. The late, great scholar of America, Wilson Carey McWilliams, once wrote that equality is a matter of qualities,

meaning that when we assert the equality of persons, we need to specify the specific qualities they possess that share a claim to equality? Is it that they

are equal in their natural freedom? Equal in the eyes of the law. Equal in what way? Broadening

out beyond the American context, the idea of equality has a long and intricate past in the

history of ideas. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.

Today we look at how various thinkers in the Western intellectual tradition have answered the question,

in what way are human beings equal? The authors we compare include Aristotle, Augustin, Luther, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hayek,

and we begin with a discussion of the fundamental

human truth of the Hebrew Bible, that all of us are created Betzelem Elohim in God's image.

My guest today is the poet, rabbi, philosopher, theologian, man of ideas, Zohar Atkins.

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