The American and British Debate over Equality, 1776-1920

James L. Huston's previous work concerned the economic background of the Civil War, agrarianism, and nineteenth-century issues surrounding wealth distribution. His latest book has a polemic edge, derived from a reading of the French economist Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013). Huston's aim is stated bluntly: to “compare the merits of equality and the vices of inequality” (p. 9). Any complexity to these words, according to the title of the book's introduction, is lost “in a definitional fog,” despite (or, more likely, because of) an overly brief survey of the work of the philosophers John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Ronald Dworkin, among others. The outcome of that comparison, according to Huston, is that equality is defined by its antithesis, inequality. Equality thus becomes a symbol of the United States, constructed by using a rhetoric of negation. The United States is whatever the United Kingdom is not. Huston's argument, appropriately, is concerned with nineteenth-century Anglo-American intellectual debate, a “duel” (the title of the book's third chapter) umpired by Alexis de Tocqueville. The rules of engagement are outlined in the first two chapters, with egalitarianism, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, constructed as a response to the hereditary principle of the British aristocracy. Chapters 3 through 5 provide supporting detail, drawn largely from travelers' accounts on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. They contrast the Jeffersonian farmer with British landowning aristocracy; examine manners and civility; and look at the importance of public education to a democracy. Chapter 6, subtitled “Democracy as Curse,” surveys British distaste for popular sovereignty. Chapter 7, “American Inequalities,” concerns “the great hypocrisy of the republic” created by the divergence of North and South and of rural and urban areas (p. 116). It acts as a prelude to a final chapter that summarizes the period 1865–1920, during which the polarities reverse, with an increasingly unequal United States in counterpoint to a democratizing United Kingdom

Aristocracy (class · Declaration of independence · Democracy · Egalitarianism · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Sociology · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Political Theory and Influence