As equality has come to dominate the postliberal era, so virtue was earlier supplanted by liberty. However tentatively, events in many countries suggest a serious erosion in the consensus for equality. Critics of the egalitarian mind-set are achieving a new respectability. Conservative recommendations are hardly uniformly accepted, but they are now heard and, increasingly, countered on practical rather than theoretical grounds. Whether this marks a real revolution, it is at least temporarily popular to question equality in public.