Qijia Liu

FYSEM II 2

Joshua Boetigger

April 19 2025

What is Equal?

The effect of the Enlightenment has been mythologized insofar as the

discussion still lasts to some extent as to which Modern/Western civilization

inherits. To trace the many clues leading to the current world, it is unarguably

necessary to unpack the historical scene and closely investigate both the basic

logic and the details. Considering such a mission, this paper provisionally

proposes that it is important not only to review what is important to the people in

their historical context, but also to deconstruct what is too fundamental to be

further pondered for them, namely, the precondition that has been almost

neglected, that turns out to be so vital that if such a foundation is taken away,

the whole edifice collapses. For such importance of a concept, it is reckoned as

the idea of equality in this paper, and two representatives are to be reexamined:

Locke and Rousseau. John Locke (1632–1704) is often considered the

“paternal origin” of the Enlightenment, particularly in the Anglo-American

tradition. His works, especially Two Treatises of Government, laid the

groundwork for modern liberal democracy. Locke views equality as a

fundamental principle of the state of nature, where all individuals have equal

natural rights. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) occupies a more radical

the Enlightenment. His idea of equality is more grand narrative and less

theoretical than Locke’s. He argues that legitimate political authority is derived

from the "general will" and that equality must be actively maintained by political

institutions. While this paper will lay aside the lavish differences and nuonces

among the two masters, but highlight the commonalities of such an

Enlightenment ideal of equality, which is not only a pivot word used as such

reveals how their consensus liberalism is a constructed utilization that

ideologically underpins modern systems of control, suppresses bodily

characteristics, but also a essencial premise of the dehumanizing: “equality” is

not as natural as it is presented in the Enlightenment context instead of being

an evaluation of persons.

What is intriguing about Enlightenment thought is the process of sealing

of premodernity—its silent, secret, and swift funeral of old, longlived, so-called

natural perspective of humans, and a completely unconscious misuse of

“equality” is superseded, which is once a narrow, simple, and direct signifier,

now has been forcibly streched to be polysemous phantom. Yet in the historical

context, the concrete concept of equality is a central but relatively subordinate

clause in the Enlightenment’s manifesto, while utilizing “freedom” is more

central and clearer.

The primary—if not the main— “state of nature” is freedom: “Men are

born free”(Rousseau 49) is a phrase of landmark flagging the characteristic of

Modernity/Westernity. However, it naturally breeds the following question: is it

true that a society that is only bound by this primary principle, possibly the ideal
conception of society to the Enlightenmentalists, would normally function,

instead of collapsing into the tyranny of the strong? As John Locke writes,

liberty unbounded by another principle ceases to be liberty, thus becomes the

occasion for the strong to subjugate the weak. So that the justification of

restraint forms a contrapuntal secondary principle, which is the means of

equality: “being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his

life, health, liberty, or possessions.”(Locke 9).

The Enlightenment’s important deviation is pretending these two

principles could coexist, when in the condition of reality, one must always

cannibalize the other: “Free” and “Equal”, the primary category and the

secondary category, are not only complementary and reciprocal but also

distinctly parallel, comparative, and intrinsically contradictory. They are aligned

forces, mirror images, and ultimately, in the practice of history, become mortal

enemies.

The tension between freedom and equality, the coherent but innately

divergent relationship, mirrors the fundamental paradox, the unanswerably

major political question of the individual and society. Locke’s "no one ought to

harm another" (Locke, 6) exposes the fundamental antagonism: the individual’s

claim to autonomy must be broken to create society, yet society exists only to

protect that autonomy. Meanwhile, Rousseau radicalizes this opposition into a

violent dialectic: the "general will" does not balance freedom and equality but

annihilates the natural individual to recreate them as an equal people, who are

“forced to be free" (Rousseau, 7). The Enlightenmentalists’ greatest parallax

permanent crisis of Modernity itself.

Furthermore, the confrontation of freedom and equality can even be the

battlefield between natural and artificial. Locke frames freedom as natural,

degenerates into license, enabling the strong to exploit the weak. Here, equality

is exposed not as a natural condition, but as a necessary political construct that

prevents freedom from degenerating into tyranny. Rousseau, by contrast,

exposes equality as the artifice that makes freedom possible—but only by

annihilating nature. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

(Rousseau, 46) Natural liberty is sacrificed on the altar of the polity, emerging

reborn as societal equality.

Equality is not only unnatural, which, even according to the

Enlightenmentalists, is the state of nature—it is the manifestation of an inductive

“nature”, whatever the word is utilized as a barbarous condition of danger and

horror; but also even further, it is not humanized, not pastoral, not belong to the

time of mortal and bodily existence, but to be utopian, heaven on earth. Eden

exists not in the past, but in the future—this becomes a basic belief of the

Enlightenment, even if the path towards it is brutish, savage, and bloody.

Equality, then, is not discovered in nature—it is initiated through an act of

politico-philosophical construction, a Modern form of metaphysicalized scientific

social study, that projects onto the reality the desire for orderliness it does not

configurally possess. The Modernity’s great reality is that its most valued ideal,

equality, is not a return to nature but its total overthrow, not human but divine in
its ambitions—a commandment from an imagined future to a present deemed

unworthy of it.

Equality is not a natural condition but an artificial construct—an

ideological imposition of Modernity that cannot be dismissed as merely

contingent or replaceable. Rather, it is the necessary precondition of a society

determined by one-dimensionality—a flattened artificial disciplinary order in

which all contradictions, differences, and unconscious ponderings are

concealed instead of a singular, homogenized, smooth network within a

horizontal layer. This presuppositional connotation has never been disguised,

as in the argument that the “association…as every individual gives himself

absolutely, the conditions are the same to all”(Rousseau, 60) correctly reveals

that the homogenization is what Modern civilized society is dependent on. The

quality of equality is manifested as sameness, which flattens the variety of

deviations of individuals into a single, universal, but discrete space, a pure

social space, in which the value of a person is their exchange value. For

instance, Locke’s equality was already tied to property relations—rights were

guaranteed only to those who could participate in the evaluation (landowners,

merchants), not mentioning that equality, in the Enlightenment/Western usage,

is the ideological substrate of a society that trades in human beings as abstract

quantities. Insofar as the usage of “what is equal” operates not through overt

exclusion but through normalizing inclusion, and becomes a tool to rationalize

domination under the evaluation of fairness, where all must conform to the

same measurable standards to be recognized as “equal”.

subjectivity. Hence, the usage of equality reduces human worth to a measurable

quantitativeness, transforming persons into ideal, interchangeable units whose

visible(but intrinsic) value would be constrained by their capacity for exchange.

Locke’s equality is precisely a formal precondition for evaluation when he

asserts that all men are "equal and independent" (II.6), he does not mean they

are substantively equal in capacity or condition as individuals, but that they are

equally legible to an enormous other, namely the mechanisms of law and

market. One must first be stripped of their will to be different from the system,

constituted as a exchangeable being, so that equality becomes its reversion: it

does not abolish inequalities but generalizes them: it evolves to be its higher,

accomplished form of fair opportunity, where ensures that all people are equally

subjugated to the higher omnipresent of a wilder dominator, nmmely the

Modern/Capitalistic society. Through this process, freedom undergoes a parallel

transformation: the form of liberty is suppressed indeed, but the suppression

exactly ensures unprecedented potentialities, possibilities, choices, novelties,

and changeabilities, which point to the content, the heart of freedom. Although

the realization of liberty constitutes the negation of itself, which is the

imprisonment of being flattened, one-dimensionalized, atomized, and gridded.

The Enlightenment's equality-liberty dyad constitutes not an once-and-for-all

resolution but a sustainable antinomy— each term presupposes and annihilates

the other in endless dialectical tension. This conceptual contradiction mirrors its

historical manifestation: the more intensely equality is pursued as an abstract

principle, the more brutally it must be imposed upon unequal practice.

due to an arbitrary evil malice, but becauce of the necessity of reducing the

uncontrollability of unformattable individuals, as if to render the modernity

legible to power, the substance of society, people of such, must first be made

measurable, stripped of qualitative excess, and redefined through uniform

metrics. —Nonetheless, this process should not be misunderstood as an

idealism of the conflict between equality and liberty, as if individuals are innately

free and only society forces them to be equal. On the contrary, sameness is the

essence of freedom; without the condition of the former, liberty, namely the

individual differences of social character, wouldn’t be interchangeable under the

same contextual layer, therefore it would be meaningless, nihilistic, and empty.

In simple terms, freedom is only legible when formatted through sameness,

making equality the infrastructural ground of liberal freedom. Lockeian liberty,

the celebrated “freedom without interference”, mediating the equivalent of

subjectivity, revealing the universal objectivity, or vice versa. The very notion of

universal(political) rights presupposes standardized subjects, abstract legal

persons stripped of their irreducible particularities and reconstituted as

interchangeable units within a juridical system. The freedom complies with the

categories, making people even easier to govern, calculable, and thus

seemingly “innately equal”. This is Enlightenment liberalism's foundational

paradox: the promise of individual freedom is contingent on the act of

homogenization, where this realization is not that equality is a lie, but that it

works too well: it convinces us that freedom is possible only after we have first

been flattened into data joints. To resist is not to reject equality outright, but to
expose the violence of its precondition: being free, people must first be made

the same.

The two subsequences of the realization of liberalistic equality are the

solution to the two contradictions above: the contradictions between individuals

and the collective, between natural and artificial. Whereas in historical practice

as well as real-life experience, there hasn’t been such a moment that, to any

degree, this harmonious resolution has ever emerged. Therefore, in conclusion,

the certainty of equalization is not realized at all. The grand promise of

equalization remains unrealized, not as a temporary failure, but as a structural

impossibility. This is no minor good news at all, but rather a resounding

declaration of the brain death of Modernity/Westernity, whose origin lies in the

myth of the Enlightenment. It is a myth that once animated the dream of

progress, reason, freedom, and universal equality, but now reveals that what

dies here is not merely a misuse of the conception or the alienation to the

begining program, but the dream itself—the fantasy that Modernity could ever

deliver on its promises without devouring the very foundations it stood upon.

There is not only an absence of any uniform solution to inequality, but more

troubling still, a fundamental lack of a universal perspective from which

inequality can even be meaningfully understood. Even more damning than the

failure to achieve equality is the failure to even see inequality. Would it—the call

for a futural Eden, the Enlightenment, becomes an Eden, a lost paradise it can

no longer envision, be desperately needed to be called?