to equality before the law; political citizenship entails access to parliamentary
institutions; and social citizenship requires a guarantee of economic and
social well-being.
Debates about equality amongst contemporary political theorists—and
liberal egalitarians in particular—have tended, until recently, to focus on
social citizenship (implicitly assuming that civil and political equality have
been assured, and therefore no longer require scrutiny). Liberal democratic
polities are grounded on their commitment to civil and political equality: to
equality before the law and the equal right to vote and stand for election for
all citizens. The pursuit of social equality has been more fraught and con-
tested, given the empirical existence of extensive inequality of wealth and
income in capitalist societies. The tension between the principled liberal-
democratic commitment to egalitarian citizenship and the continued mater-
ial inequality of economic and social well-being has generated a substantial
theoretical literature, which attempts to explain and justify the place of social
inequality from an egalitarian perspective. This literature might, perhaps
rather uncharitably, be viewed as an elaborate attempt to reconcile the
demands of citizenship with the need for proWtability (Turner 1986 , 27 ).
From this perspective, debates about equality amongst liberal political the-
orists can be understood as attempts to square the commitment to social
justice with an acceptance of social inequality. Central to this project have
been the notions of meritocracy and equality of opportunity, as distinct from
equality of outcome or condition.
It has been suggested that political theorists tend to operate on an ‘‘egali-
tarian plateau,’’ in which everyone accepts that citizens should be treated as
equals (see Dworkin 1997 , 179 – 83 ; Kymlicka 1990 , 5 ). However, there is a
profound disagreement as to whether ‘‘treating people as equals’’ requires
anything beyond formal civil and political equality. Disagreement about the
(il)legitimacy of inequalities of income and wealth from an egalitarian per-
spective has focused attention on what has come to be called (usually by its
critics) a ‘‘distributive paradigm,’’ whereby theorists reXect upon which
distributions are just.
TheWrst thing of note within this literature is that very few people indeed
argue for a distribution of wealth and income that is ‘‘equal’’ in the sense of
being the same for all. In the 1930 s R. H. Tawney was happy to argue that:
‘‘Though an ideal of an equal distribution of material wealth may continue to
elude us, it is necessary, nevertheless, to make haste towards it.. .’’ (Tawney
1931 , 291 ) Dworkin, by contrast, states categorically that no one would now
472 judith squires