Equality as a Problem, Greatness as a Solution

Abstract

The article deals with the issue of equality in contemporary political philosophy. The main purpose is to identify the current state of the academic debate, in which the issue is discussed, and to propose an alternative approach as a solution to the impasses that the main currents of thought around the subject have bequeathed to real politics. We first present the premises of what we call negationist criticism, a tradition of ideas with roots in European socialism that identifies the foundations of inequality in social structures and proposes agendas for total change in society. Next, we present the premises of social democratic neoliberalism, a broad body of ideas and practices that updated eighteenth and nineteenth century liberalism, in order to deal with the problem of inequality in light of the imperative of freedom and meritocracy. This allows for a lateral concern with the economic and social distortions to which redistributive and reparative intervention agendas are dedicated, without modifying the structures of social life. As an alternative to both prevailing paradigms, we hold what we call transformative institutionalism, which identifies inequality as a problem related to the structuring of original advantages in societies, whose therapeutics relies on institutional imagination, whereby changing structures becomes an issue of reorganizing existing institutional arrangements. The ultimate goal is to enable a chain reaction of transformations. This perspective is guided by the ideal of greatness, which, translated into real politics, means the aggrandizement of common people rather than an appeal to absolute equality or supreme freedom as values in themselves.