Artificial Equality

Treating people as equals: Is this something that a political community can just decide to do regardless of what people are like, regardless of their similarities and differences? Is it something we can do even when we are not compelled to do it by what we know of human nature?

Hannah Arendt's affirmative answers to these questions are among the best-known features of her political philosophy. Arendt suggested that we might adopt a principle of treating one another as equals, not because of any similarities among us, but because such a principle makes possible a form of political community that we could not otherwise have. This is something the ancient Athenians did, she says; they identified a class of persons to treat as equal citizens even though others physically indistinguishable from them were subordinated as slaves (OR, 30–1). And this is something she says we can do too. By nature, we may be quite different from one another. But by convention, we hold ourselves to be one another's equals. We promised in the Declaration of Independence (and moved toward fulfillment of that promise in the Thirteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act) that, unlike the Athenians, we would not consign a race of people to permanently inferior status as slaves and noncitizens. But nothing, she says – neither God nor nature – compelled us to take that position. “We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights” (OT, 301). Arendt understood political equality not as something inherent in human nature, but as something conventional and artificial, the product of human effort, an artifact of social and political institutions in a man-made world. “Our political life,” she said, “rests on the assumption that we can produce equality through organization,” even when nature has not produced it for us (OT, 301). For our engagement in the joint enterprise of politics, the law can create for each of us an artificial persona – the citizen – that takes its place on the public stage, presenting us not exactly as the beings we naturally are, but as equals for political purposes.