1.2 Bourgeois perception of equality
Modern perception of equality has developed into a new high, of which the most influential came from the western bourgeois philosophers.From the British philosophers Hobbes and Locke to the French enlightenment philosophers Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot and Helvétius, they all recognized natural human rights.They all recognized that man is free and equal in the state of nature and that in political life; all men are entitled with equal rights before the law.Based on that, Rousseau further analyzed and criticized private property which was the origin of inequality among men. He pointed out that the fundamental way to equality was to build a modern country respecting social contract and“the Sovereignty of the People”.
Background information
As then, to establish slavery, it was necessary to do violence to nature, so, in order to perpetuate such a right, nature would have to be changed.Jurists, who have gravely determined that the child of a slave comes into the world a slave, have decided, in other words, that a man shall come into the world not a man.
I regard it then as certain, that government did not begin with arbitrary power, but that this is the deprivation, the extreme term, of government, and brings it back, finally, to just the law of the strongest, which it was originally designed to remedy.Supposing, however, it had begun in this manner, such power, being in itself illegitimate, could not have served as a basis for the laws of society, nor, consequently, for the inequality they instituted.
—DiscourseontheOriginand Foundations of Inequality Among Men
Firstly, all men are created equal.Each person has the natural right to happiness.Hobbes wrote, “Human individuals are ‘by nature' equal in their physical and mental abilities.”
Although physical abilities may be different among people, this difference is not big enough for a certain person to be superior to others, because no matter how strong a person is, he/she alone cannot resist the united power of the vulnerable people.Compared with physical abilities, people are more equal mentally and intellectually.All men are born with rationality. There exist neither absolute“masters”who are outstandingly intelligent nor“slaves”who are physically strong but mentally weak.Rationality is not magic.Instead, it is cognitive ability for experience. People may obtain equal rationality from the same thing within the same period of time.Each adult owns rationality for self-discipline and nobody is stupid enough to be managed by others voluntarily.In general, men are equal by nature in their physical and mental abilities.That equality not only results from biological instincts, but also from the possessive instincts for all external things.When many people are vying for the same thing that cannot be shared or divided, they will go to war.Therefore, political society is a must to prevent wars.
Secondly, all men have equal political rights.Although Locke considers the state of nature to be the state of equality, but the state of nature itself is not perfect.He identifies three major problems with it.They are the needs for a Legislative, a Judiciary, and an Executive branch.This defection allowed selfishness, malignance, irrationality and revenge, which are frailties of human nature.Those frailties can be used to wage wars and to destroy people's natural rights.In order to keep orders and prevent conflicts to safeguard natural rights（especially property rights）for all, rational people unite to form a state and place themselves under the authority of a government.So the state is originated from equal social contracts among equal individuals, not from the ancient patriarchy.Therefore, the autocracy where the elderly, the intellectual and the noble ruled the“inferior”people was unjustified.In addition, the government entrusted by the people is a legitimate sovereign organization.It shall pass laws to protect people's natural rights and it shall not govern actively.Everyone must be treated equally under the law regardless of their status.In order to prevent the government from abusing sovereign rights and restoring tyranny, the power of government should be separated and checked.If the government behaves against people's will, people can replace it with a new one through violent revolutions.
Thirdly, a democratic republic can ensure that equal natural rights could develop into equal political rights.Rousseau thought that the development from the state of nature to a political community is the consequence of man's“faculty of self-improvement”.But this political society is first of all autocratic on the basis of private property.In other words, the perception of private property is invented by the society rather than a product of the minds of a natural man as Locke proposed.“The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society.” The appearance of private property leads to consecutive unequal phenomena, the rich and the poor, the governor and the governed, and masters and slaves.Rousseau proposed“the Sovereignty of the People”to prevent private property from impairing the equal natural rights. First, all the people establish a state and a government through equal negotiations for contracts, and they become the master of the state ever since.Respecting the“general will”, the state acquires sovereignty and the authority on all the members of community.However, the state sovereignty is based on“general will”instead of“the will of all”, so it reflects the internal requirement of public interests instead of the external aggregation of private interests.Thus in the absolute sense, sovereignty is in fact in the hands of people.People are the mainstay of all basic political activities and they must exercise sovereignty directly.The government supports its people in exercising sovereignty.As an executive administration, its authority is en trusted by the“general will”, so the people could limit, change or take back that trust.People supervise the government through regular meetings at which there are only two issues to be discussed.One is whether the present government could be retained, and the other is whether the present officials could be retained.This shows that the state and the government respecting“the Sovereignty of the People”would fully respect the spirit of equality.
After western bourgeois philosophers interpreted equality as a fundamental value, the principle of equality broke away from the principle of morality of ancient metaphysics and became an inspiration in practical activities.The French Revolution in the 18th century was to some extent the implementation of the principle of equality in the real life.The Revolution targeted aristocratic privileges.
Before the Revolution, the feudal nobility had been entitled with a plethora of privileges.They inherited title of nobility, but were exempted from taxation.In contrast, the common people, including the bourgeois, workers and farmers, paid taxes.But they were reduced to the bottom of the society.They grumbled at this extreme political and economic inequality.At the same time, bourgeois philosophers argued for the natural law of equality and revealed the illegitimacy of feudalism, and they won public support.All those were the preparations for the Revolution.In particular, encouraged by“the Sovereignty of the People”proposed by Rousseau, a large number of workers and farmers joined the Revolution and united with the bourgeoisie to overthrow the autocracy.The Revolution got nationwide support.In 1789, inspired by the slogan“liberty, equality, and fraternity”, the French people assaulted the Bastille, the Revolution breaking out.During the process of the Revolution, the newly established National Assembly declared, “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights”.The Assembly also declared the abolition of all feudal privileges.Those decisions wiped out the feudal hierarchy.They publicly confirmed equal rights for the first time.After that, “equality before the law”becomes basic social values engraved into every aspect of capitalist democracy.
At the crossroad from feudalism to capitalism, the French Revolution, with equality as its ultimate goal, paved the way for future revolutions.It became the centerpiece of the world modern history. As a bourgeois revolution, it abolished feudalism and established the first capitalist democratic republic in France, enhancing the development of capitalist industry and business.As a civilian revolution pursuing equality, it stated the abolition of feudal nobility in the text of basic law so that all citizens had the political freedom to implement equal rights, which freed up minds of workers and farmers as well as of the bourgeoisie.Therefore, Marx complimented the Revolution as saying the word“equality”has the root in the French language. At the same time, the National Assembly gave property right equal status as natural rights.“Equality is set aside again by restraining it to a mere ‘equality before the law', which means equality in spite of the inequality of rich and poor—equality within the limits of the chief inequality existing—which means, in short, nothing else but giving inequality the name of equality.”With the rapid development of capitalism in France and the western community as a whole, the structure of social classes changed accordingly.The society gradually split into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.The bourgeoisie exploited the proletariat, increasing the inequality in capitalist society. Against that backdrop, utopian socialism which represented the expectations of the proletariat on equality came into people's sight.
Background information
Therefore I must say that, as I hope for mercy, I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who, on pretence of managing the public, only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill-acquired, and then, that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please; and if they can but prevail to get these contrivances established by the show of public authority, which is considered as the representative of the whole people, then they are accounted laws; yet these wicked men, after they have, by a most insatiable covetousness, divided that among themselves with which all the rest might have been well supplied, are far from that happiness that is enjoyed among the Utopians.
—Utopia
First of all, the utopian socialists revealed and criticized the political and economical inequality of capitalism.Saint-Simon pointed out that compared with slavery and feudalism, capitalism was a new form of enslaving.Capitalists use capital to hire labor force and obtain wealth created by workers.The laborers become increasingly impoverished and in the end penniless.Thus they are reduced to be the slaves of capital.Therefore, capitalist civilization is essentially a system through which the rich amass wealth by exploiting the poor. Furthermore, this system causes extreme inequality between capitalists and workers in political interests.The Enclosure Movement in England is a typical example of political suppression.At that time, the emerging bourgeois class not only brought about the tragedy of“sheep eating men”, but also made use of the state power to force homeless peasants to be subject to hired labor and became“lower classes”without any political dignity or equality.That was cruel autocracy.According to Robert Owen, capitalist politics and laws are extremely unjust and used by the powerful to suppress the vulnerable in conflicts.
By criticizing the bourgeoisie for their economic and political privileges, the utopian socialists drew a blueprint for economic and political systems for the future society.In their opinions, private property is the culprit of inequality as well as the driving force to deepen and expand that inequality.So, to eliminate inequality and to build up equality, men shall end private property and develop common ownership of property.In the City of the Sun designed by Tommaso Campanella, “They are rich because they want nothing; poor because they possess nothing; and consequently they are not slaves to circumstances, but circumstances serve them.”Besides, the utopian socialists believed in the Sovereignty of the People.They campaigned for the political principles of democratic election and collective leadership and hoped to implement those principles through regular elections and public supervision.They tried to bring into life the commitment of“all equal before the law”.As Saint-Simon put it, unlike the present political system where the government only favors a certain class, in an ideal society, the government must bring benefits to the whole society.In the present society, the bourgeoisie are the only beneficiary, but the working class are suffering.
When developing and criticizing the political equality of capitalism, the utopian socialists put forward a brand new theory of equality and upgraded formal equality to substantial equality.According to Saint-Simon, equality could not be simply considered as property egalitarianism; instead, it refers to the same social circumstances and conditions in which people make a living and gaining wealth.The most important symbol of equality of a society lies in whether the social status and the income of a person match his/her talents and contributions.In addition, the social basis of equality is universal labor, which means all shall work, and the privileged class in old society who lived on the work of others must be abolished.A healthy society shall be the community of laborers.Since there exist physical labor and mental labor and individual laborers are different in competences, the income and the social status shall be in proportion to the competence and the contribution of the individuals.So the principle of“distribution on the basis of labor”would reflect social equality. Actually, this principle is not yet the highest standard of equality. When social production gets highly developed, “distribution on the basis of needs”would become an important indicator for equality. Evidently, the utopian socialists emphasized the content and basis of equality and the dialectical relationship between equality and social development, and they answered several important questions concerning social equality.
To sum up, the bourgeois perception of equality grew from antifeudalism revolutions, aiming to establish a capital system.It had both advances and limitations.In terms of advances, it broke up the traditional hierarchy and raised advanced philosophies as all are created equal and all are equal before the law.That freed up the minds of both the bourgeoisie and any other social classes.However, the form and the content of bourgeois perception of equality are contradictory.With the capitalist private property, the political and legal equality was just in theory.In practice, the bourgeoisie amassed wealth and obtained economic and political privileges.As a result, the working class became impoverished and vulnerable.Seeing this new inequality, the utopian socialists gave their insights for equality.They criticized private property and capitalist democracy and expressed their desire for achieving substantial economic equality, political equality and social equality.They took the lead to develop a proletariat perception of equality.However, this proletariat perception grew from an immature system of capitalist productions and immature class struggles, so the theory has big flaws.It tinges with the sense of bourgeois equality and it is apparently utopian.
Firstly, like bourgeois thinkers, the utopian socialists placed equality on the basis of the abstract theory of human nature, namely, the physical equality and the mental equality.Secondly, although they realized that the root cause of social inequality is private property, they did not systematically analyze the negative impact on equality by private property.They did not study with historical materialism approach the contradiction between productive forces and production relations behind equality.Also, they did not analyze the class nature of capitalist exploitation and enslavement on the proletariat from the perspective of surplus value, so they could not explain the reasons why the bourgeois perception of equality has disadvantages. The utopian socialists proposed to establish common ownership and to realize social equality, but they did not think of effective methods to put their thoughts into practice.So their thoughts are purely utopian.However, their new thinking of common ownership and social equality prepared the stage for Marxist perception of equality.Marx and Engels studied and criticized both bourgeois and utopian socialist perceptions of equality and ultimately created the equality theory of scientific socialism.