Review of: George Hull (ed.), The Equal Society: Essays in Theory and Practice, Rowman and Littlefield, December 2015, 354pp. (original) (raw)

would be the central characteristics of a society in which its citizens are truly treated as equals? While egalitarian thinkers are united in their affirmation of the value of equality, they notoriously have --for centuries --disagreed about its interpretation. Egalitarianism now is a dominant current within Western moral and political philosophy, but it is also very broad and multifaceted. There is a wide range of mutually inconsistent egalitarian conceptions, ranging from libertarian and meritocratic positions to social liberal, communitarian and socialist ones. Therefore, the decisive question is not whether one should be an egalitarian, but what kind of egalitarian one should be, and how to interpret the central tenet of equal treatment more concretely in political theory and practice.