nightmares, hope and heartache, love and loss, courage and fear,
sacrifice and selfishness.”^48 Empathy, respect, and communication
prevailed here over the struggle for survival.
People on the left and on the right promote different standards of
equality precisely because they have different views about human
nature and society, different expectations about life in a community.
These contrasting views are constitutive of the modern political debate,
and were articulated from the very beginning by philosophers like
Thomas Hobbes and John Locke on one side, and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels on the other.
Thomas Hobbes, who wrote his Leviathan (1651) during the
English Civil Wars, was pessimistic about human nature, which he
saw as governed by competition, envy, and fear. Without a strong
authoritarian government, humans were condemned to live in a per-
manent state of war, “where every man is enemy to every man.” In
such a violent state of nature, men would be unable to produce, invest,
invent, or create, and their life would remain “solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short.”^49 More moderate, John Locke nevertheless con-
verged with Hobbes in favoring a state strong enough to protect
individual property, in his view the cornerstone of individual auton-
omy, which would be threatened without laws and legal institutions.^50
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the contrary, saw human nature as intrin-
sically good and compassionate, and property as usurpation and
theft, the source of all that is corrupt in society: “you are undone,” he
affirmed in his 1754 discourse on the origin of inequality among men,
“if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the
earth itself to nobody.”^51 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels likewise
associated inequality and alienation with the division of labor and
with the rise of private property, even though they were less sanguine
about a primitive stage that remained limited by scarcity and “sur-
rounded by superstition.” The distribution of labor and its products in
(^48) Bill Clinton,My Life, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, p. 15.
(^49) Thomas Hobbes,Leviathan(1651), Chapter 13,www.constitution.org/th/
50 leviatha.htm.
Robert Castel,L’inse ́curite ́sociale: qu’est-ce qu’eˆtre prote ́ge ́?, Paris, Seuil,
51 2003, pp. 12–17.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “A Discourse on a Subject Proposed by the Academy of
Dijon: What Is the Origin of Inequality Among Men, and Is It Authorised by
Natural Law,” Part II (1754), trans. G. D. H. Cole,www.constitution.org/jjr/
ineq.htm.
A clash over equality 21