Challenging Diversity: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference. By Davina Cooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 246p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

In the Encyclopedia (1751–65), the Chevalier de Jaucourt observed that while “natural equality” is the moral foundation of liberty, “absolute equality” in society is a “chimera” of fanatic minds. In the social state, he explained, distinctions and subordinations are necessary, including those attached to “differences of condition.” Later, as the old order yielded to democracy, Tocqueville discerned an inexorable tendency toward the leveling of those very differences. Would it end, he wondered, in a new Caesaristic despotism in which an atomized populace, deprived of the protection of intermediate powers, is enslaved by an all-powerful ruler? In modern societies considered free, the march toward equality of conditions has stopped well short of this dead end. But how does the modern conception of equality square with ways of living that challenge prevailing social norms? That is the subject of this inquiry, which, somewhat ironically, aims to restate from a leftist perspective the case put by the Chevalier de Jaucourt for accepting some such differences.