Anne Phillips - Unconditional Equals

1. vii
2. 1
3. 18
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5. 63
6. 86

I COMPLETED the first draft of Unconditional Equals in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, at a time when journalists were still describing it as the great leveller, and appreciative publics across the world were applauding the courage and dedication of an army of previously unrecognised workers. Our lives depended, not only on the doctors and nurses working tirelessly in the hospitals, but on the often poorly protected care workers, on the cleaners, transport workers, ambulance drivers, security guards, supermarket staff. We had learnt, it seemed, that the work that most mattered to our survival was not that of the more highly remunerated members of our societies; if anything, it was low pay and status that signalled how crucial you were. In those moments, I briefly doubted the relevance of my arguments. The book arises from a distrust of the happy stories sometimes told about the progress of equality. Not the progress of material equality, for most of us know this hasnt been going too well, but the still comforting story we tell ourselves about the progress of ideas of equality, the abandonment of older notions of natural hierarchy, and the supposedly now widespread belief that all humans are, in some basic sense, of equal worth. Much as I would like to believe that story, the evidence is against it. We do not live in an era when all are regarded as of equal worth, regardless of their sex, race, or class, and rather than treating this as a time laga matter of not yet or not enoughI have come to think there is something about dominant ideas of equality that obscures, perhaps even enables, the continuing inequality.

In the early months of the pandemic, I wondered if I was putting too pessimistic a gloss on the evidence, and whether what seemed to be a recognition of the previously undervalued might indicate a turning point towards a more far-reaching egalitarianism. But reality soon reasserted itself. The disease proved disproportionately to affect the poor, the migrant workers, those living in overcrowded conditions, those in an ethnic minority; international initiatives to combine against the pandemic were watered down by the tendency to set ones own citizens above those of any other country; and the economic consequences of lockdown weighed far more heavily on women, and those in lower-paid and precarious occupations. I decided not to rewrite.

The book is a culmination of ideas developed, but also revised, over the course of many years, and I am grateful to Adam Swift for encouraging me to think of it as in some sense a reflection on my own intellectual trajectory. (This was in passing remarks at a publishers party: he has probably forgotten.) One of the pleasures in writing has been the recognition of where my ideas have changed and where they have remained reasonably consistent. There is a continuity, for example, between some of the ideas developed here and those put forward in an earlier Which Equalities Matter?, except that the arguments there were still overly shaped by what I now see as a misleading distinction between formal and real equality. There is also a continuity between my focus here on the mass exclusions that characterise early articulations of equality and analyses I have offered in the past regarding the relationship between liberalism and feminism. Feminists have sometimes argued that the ideas of early liberalism contained enormous potential for gender equality, if only people could get past their initial resistance to applying them to women as well; but this strand of thinking has coexisted with a suspicion that the very ways in which ideas of equality or freedom were articulated were such as to make them inherently exclusionary. Influenced especially by the writings of Carole Pateman, I have long positioned myself with those who doubt the more complacent originary stories, take the exclusions in early liberalism as more than incidental, and stress the need for more radical revision. It has taken me somewhat longer to connect this tale of patriarchal evasion to histories of slavery and racism, or to my own earlier work on The Enigma of Colonialism, and to register how thoroughly ideas of equality are imbued with exclusionary conditions.

A number of people read and commented on parts or the whole, and I am grateful for their suggestions. David Axelsen and Sarah Goff commented on the earliest formulations of the project and I very much valued their initial encouragement. I have benefitted from stimulating conversations about equality with Teresa Bejan (though increasingly via email rather than in person, as Covid wore on), and am especially grateful for her detailed comments on the more historical aspects. Ian Carter generously responded to my criticism of his work, providing helpful clarification of his ideas and usefully pinpointing our key areas of disagreement. Bruno Leopold applied his detailed knowledge of Marx to the chapter on the status/material divide. Particular thanks to the five people who read the manuscript in full and whose comments helped guide the final revisions: Ciaran Driver, Serene Khader, Nicola Lacey, Jonathan Wolff, and an anonymous reader for Princeton. I very much appreciated both the care with which you all read the manuscript and the encouragement you gave me. Finally, my thanks to Sumi Madhok, who first alerted me to the writings of Sylvia Wynter, and whose own work has contributed to the development of my ideas.

UNCONDITIONAL EQUALS