Isonomy

If mankind has risen above religion and equality before God, where does he turn for equality?

 

Isonomy means equality of political rights. Isonomy derives from the Greek terms ísos meaning “equal” and nómos meaning “law.” It entered English around 1600.

 

In On Revolution, in 1963, Hannah Arendt wrote "Isonomy guaranteed … equality, but not because all men were born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men were by nature ... not equal, and needed an artificial institution, the polis, which by virtue of its νόμος would make them equal.

 

Read that again.
 

Arendt’s reading of the American Revolution was that the founders were after freedom, which they didn’t initially define all that sharply but which probably meant mostly negative individual freedom: “the more or less free range of non-political activities which a given body politic will permit and guarantee to those who constitute it." But in creating new institutions that would protect that kind of freedom, they discovered public freedom—the freedom to create together. And this was a source of happiness for them: “they were enjoying what they were doing far beyond the call of duty.”

In the French Revolution, however, the leaders felt themselves compelled by great forces beyond their control and they also lost interest in creating new institutions or even following the rules they had constructed as they declared the “social problem” the only thing that mattered. As a result, they lost all forms of freedom.

 

De Tocqueville thought freedom and equality were in opposition. "Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."
 

But for Arendt, public freedom requires equality. People are not naturally equal but they are made equal in “artificial” political spaces, “where men [meet] one another as citizens and not as private persons.” The tyrant, the master and the slave are not free because they are not engaged in equal politics.

 

The historian Stuart Finkel had the startling observation that communists have always acted more forcibly to undermine free association than to undermine free enterprise. When Lenin launched the New Economic Plan in the 1920s, Anne Applebaum notes in her Iron Curtain, the "systematic destruction of literary, philosophical, and spiritual societies continued unabated."

It is remarkable how insightful tyrants are.

 

So here is liberty and Equality joined within the structure of Law and Free Association.