EQUAL OPPORTUNITY AND "THE RACE OF LIFE"
Kramnick, Isaac
A fair race was what Lyndon Johnson pleaded for in his 1965 commencement address at Howard University that ushered in the era of affirmation action. You do not take a person, who for years...
...Nor is romantic nostalgia for the stable, ordered, and noncompetitive Middle Ages what I would offer...
...The traditional hierarchical world was replaced in Western Europe by the modern liberal world as we know it...
...it is the product of what one can get and what one does in the competitive market...
...Imagine the transformation of American life that would come from implementing Robert Woolf's suggestion of two decades ago that students be assigned to universities at random by computers...
...They are committed ultimately to individualism, equal opportunity, and a competitive society...
...181 Women were socialized to avoid the race, to avoid the ambitious individual scramble for rewards to talent and merit...
...You went to the trouble of being born, and no more...
...No cooperation, no collective good is sought...
...This utopian ideal need not revive the entire world that was lost to liberal hegemony...
...Basic to both the dreams of Figaro and of Schwartzkopf is a vision of society where the rule of privilege is replaced by equal opportunity and where individuals, now masters of their destiny, are no longer the slaves of history, tradition, or birth...
...Much of the ambience of affirmative action already points to a renaissance of a world where extrinsic affiliation not individual achievement is critical, where ascriptive identity with a geographic place, a race, a sex, or ethnic group helps define one's sense of self, rather than simply the unique talent or merit of that self...
...One of the serious crimes in the ante-bellum South was teaching a slave to read and write...
...A principal theorist of this shift in liberal attitudes was T. H. Green, the Oxford philosopher...
...They are but temporary expedients, however, for they assume the context of a competitive race...
...Capitalists (and even Marxists) are convinced that individuals find fulfillment primarily through productive work...
...Enter then the liberal state with the principal task of protecting the fruits of industry and providing safety and a more commodious living for competitive individuals...
...Hence all must live in peace as well as they possibly can...
...The inequality derived from labour and successful enterprise, the result of superior industry and good fortune, is an inequality essential to the very existence of society...
...We are, of course, familiar with the religious interpretation of this linkage from the more recent writings of Max Weber and R. H. Tawney, but less 183 familiar with the explicit claims of the early liberals themselves...
...Each competitor will "run as hard as he can, and strain every move and every muscle, in order to outstrip all his competitors...
...They involve an intellectual crisis that goes to the very heart of liberalism...
...Instead, "women were always on the watch to please...
...Equal seldom, however, Smith admits, does anyone look at the race in such an "abstract and philosophical light"—and a good thing, too...
...Are individuals being treated unfairly in the effort to deal equally with groups...
...and may have a fair opportunity of exerting to advantage any talents he may possess...
...By reserving offices, power, and authority for the privileged it tilts the competition in favor of an idle aristocracy devoid of talent and virtue...
...Just as quotas and affirmative action often set blacks to run only with other blacks, whites only with other whites, so a larger pie means simply a larger race...
...Play need never end, nor need it have winners and losers...
...This, too, is nothing new...
...One group of writers and activists, relatively unknown today, popularized the metaphor and its corollary of equal opportunity more than any other and deserves special mention...
...It need not be a completely socialist economy with collectivization of the means of production...
...O III ne often-noted feature of the contemporary crisis is the pervasive anxiety among whites (and men in general) about the possible loss of status, wealth, and privilege in the wake of an aggressive affirmative action policy...
...Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing...
...they must have winners and losers...
...Proposals to broaden the notion of deserving talent and merit beyond successful market skills and to reward the generous, the loving, the kind, the good, the cooperative would again simply provide new races...
...But competitive individuals, constantly seeking power and wealth, are 179 constantly frightened lest the fruits of their work, their property, be stolen by other competing individuals...
...The second document is from Thomas Mann, part of whose genius consisted in his ability to describe with meticulous accuracy European bourgeois civilization...
...What can legitimate some having more than others...
...And only then can the preoccupation with equal opportunity be transcended, and affirmative action redefined to encompass real equality...
...The count seems almost to have outwitted Figaro in Act Five, which prompts Figaro to his famous denunciation: Just because you're a great Lord, you think you're a genius...
...This basic human inequality in talents will, in a free society, legitimize status differentials...
...To feel that we are taken no notice of, necessarily damps the most agreeable hope, and disappoints the most ardent desire, of human nature...
...A person's value or worth (a fascinating word if one thinks of it) is determined by the market...
...Whatever just and progressive purposes the ideal of equal opportunity has served at various historical moments, it still envisages life as a war of all against all with persons of worth as victor...
...It emerged at a specific historic moment, for specific reasons, and with specific intellectual justifications...
...It is a moral economy, as E. P. Thompson has called it, which flourished before the advent of the free economy of market society, that I want to revive...
...Individuals compete on an equal footing and as in any race, some win, others lose...
...They raise to public awareness the insecurity and anxiety inherent in a market society...
...An unexpected note of pessimism sneaks in with Smith's acknowledgment that the race seldom provides "real satisfaction," and that it is often really "contemptible and trifling...
...What if the basic liberal assumptions about the conditioning role of environment, education, and nurturing are wrong...
...bourgeois society, they assumed, would still have inequalities...
...Freedom involves unrestrained individual competition and equality, an absence of builtin handicaps...
...She lamented their socially conditioned lack of ambition...
...We, the bourgeoisie—the Third Estate as we have been called—we recognize only that nobility which consists of merit...
...Wollstonecraft's message was that women should become more like the assertive men of the middle class...
...They persist because the race of life has winners and losers and, above all else, bourgeois man fears failure...
...So that all men, without distinction, shall be able to strive together and receive their reward according to their merit...
...They no longer tended to see their place in life as part of some natural, inevitable, and eternal plan...
...But we ought also to be clear that certain questions are not confronted by the ideological tradition traced here...
...What might a new world view look like...
...They are treated by the modern liberal as if they were living in the feudal, precapitalist world...
...But why should work alone or even principally define one's sense of self...
...Two important forms of liberal doctrine are being played off against one another...
...Inherent in this is the birth of the market society, where the allocation and distribution of such valuable things as power, wealth, and fame came to be seen as the result of countless individual decisions, not of some authoritative norms set by custom, God, or ruling-class decree...
...Positive state action is needed, it is argued, to enable blacks to compete on equal terms—which brings us full-circle back to Lyndon Johnson, Bakke, and Weber...
...Equality of opportunity is not really a theory of equality, but of justified and morally acceptable inequality...
...each and every runner in it should have an equal opportunity to win...
...Races begin and end...
...Priestley warned that if preferment would not come to talented, dissenters, then as "citizens of the world" they would get up and go to where their virtuous achievements were rewarded...
...While there were limits initially to what one could own in terms of what one could use, and what would not spoil, the invention of money put an end to these restraints...
...with rewards to merit and talent...
...that the poor have rights to a decent life...
...Who has more, who has less, whether some get any, is decided less by a social or moral consensus than by the free action of individual actors seeking their own gain in a context of continuous competition...
...This, indeed, is the critical point...
...they possessed the opportunity (a key word) to determine their place through their own voluntary actions in this life and in this world...
...For Bentham all life was "a universal scramble" for "money, power and prestige," and the "suffering from loss," he wrote, was infinitely greater than "the enjoyment from gain...
...Are governments once again interfering with the race of life and saying who will win...
...He even invokes Figaro...
...The new theory of individuality had profound political implications...
...Drawn from diverse sources, the moral economy assumes that buying and selling is subordinate to the moral purposes of community and social life...
...These 18th-century dissenting radicals reveal a crucial contradiction at the heart of liberal social theory...
...Huizinga noted in his Homo Ludens that the bourgeois era with its utilitarianism, its efficiency, its preoccupation with serious work, has killed off what he called the "play-factor" in social life and ended the imaginative and fanciful sense of self...
...So war was declared against religious restraint on free thought and against economic restraint on a free market...
...There is no ideal of community or quest for the common good...
...In England in the last two decades of the 18th century, an amazing group of radical Protestant dissenters (non180 Anglicans, that is, Baptists, Presbyterians, Independents, Unitarians, and Quakers) articulated the principles of revolutionary bourgeois ideology in a devastating attack on the aristocracy and the aristocratic world view...
...Workers, like women, lived outside market society...
...Is it basic to our humanity to compete with one another...
...To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of...
...For Smith the possibility of losing ground was "worse than death...
...In the midst of a crowd, at church, in the market, at a play, at an execution, or coronation, he is in such obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar...
...There is Thomas Hobbes's brilliant model of individualistic society, offered in the 1650s, with its vision of human beings as self-moving, self-directing independent machines, constantly competing with one another for power, wealth, and glory...
...In the competitive scramble of the marketplace, all citizens are equal in their opportunity to win: no one has built-in advantages of birth or status...
...Unlike bourgeois man she lacked any desire to improve herself...
...But it is not some timeless, eternal ideal of humanity found, like so much else of our culture, in the antique world of Greece or Rome or the Judeo-Christian tradition...
...All the themes discussed here are repeated...
...Smith pulled together the diverse strands of emerging liberal-bourgeois thought and produced the first complete statement of liberal social theory...
...Now, and this is the truly critical step, what one did in this world came soon to be understood primarily as what one did economically, what one did in terms of work...
...And here is the heart of the matter, the grand historical reversal produced by today's crisis of liberal ideology...
...By the latter part of the 19th century, more and more European liberals began to have second thoughts and to call upon the state to protect workers with factory legislation, health and education acts, and so on...
...As we grapple with these issues we must realize how the very language of our dilemmas presumes a framework of beliefs centering on individuality, equality of opportunity, and a market society...
...For they deem war a serious thing, though in war there is neither play nor culture worthy the name, which are the things we deem most serious...
...that there are moral limits to accumulation...
...The plot, though complicated, is for our purposes, quite simple...
...places him out of the sight of mankind...
...The state had to augment workers' power and resources, even at the expense of cherished contractual rights...
...How else can achievement and sense of self be known if not by economic success...
...What are the trade-offs between pushing the advance of America's highly technological medicine for the few or seeking an improved health system for the many provided by a less than expert corps of lay practitioners emphasizing prevention and lacking the talents of an expertly trained medical elite...
...The rule is not "let all mankind be perpetually equal...
...Equality of opportunity presumes a noncooperative vision of society...
...The society is free if the race is fair...
...The aim, however, is the same as it was earlier: a fair race...
...Let the race be fair, let all have an equal chance to win...
...There was a time in the West when play not races preoccupied us...
...John Locke, in turn, introduces a moral revolution, one absolutely essential for the liberal world of individuality and equal opportunity...
...But the ageold invisibility of these latter groups and the fear of invisibility among today's privileged groups follow alike from the inner logic of liberal ideology, where self-esteem and a sense of personality are inextricably tied to degrees of accumulation and success in the race of life...
...These are values at the very core of liberal society, and since Bakke, Weber, and affirmative action involve contradictions and strains within that set of values, the current crisis is bound to be far-reaching and painful...
...The Acts also excluded nonsubscribers to the Anglican creed from any office in an incorporated municipality...
...Incredible achievers, the Protestant dissenters, while only 7 percent of the population, were found as leaders in every new and successful enterprise that marked the industrial revolution...
...Equality for liberals really means fairness...
...work became a concrete test and property a material extension of self...
...He called upon the state, therefore, to establish the conditions that would enable workers to join the race...
...He still assumes that life is a scramble for selfrealization through achievement and success, and that this is a moral vision of society and of life...
...And why should citizens not aspire to civil offices...
...The focus of this debate has justifiably been on the here and now...
...Workers, he wrote, were not in fact free to act voluntarily in the market...
...The group included the Reverend Joseph Priestley, the eminent scientist, the Reverend Richard Price, Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, James Burgh, Anna Barbauld, and others...
...Now, in the writings of Green, it involved restricting market freedoms to provide conditions that would allow the proletariat to acquire the skills necessary to compete...
...What a revolution is in this metaphor...
...It doesn't definitely give the victory, that is, jobs or medical degrees, to anyone, especially not to anyone seen as untalented and therefore undeserving...
...One need not be one of Michael Young's fanciful "prols" to propose a less slavish preoccupation with merit and talent in our society...
...Only success in the marketplace brings the notice and valuation of others...
...Fifteen years later, Bakke, Weber, and the politics of affirmative action have stirred up a great public debate...
...This ambition, he wrote in his Wealth of Nations, is "a desire which comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go into the grave...
...If individuals are to define their individuality in terms of what they achieve, and if this sense of achievement is seen in terms of work in a market society where God-given talent and industry can have their play, then the barriers to unlimited accumulation have to fall...
...Racial issues were brought to political saliency in this century by these very same liberal descendants of T. H. Green...
...In a moral economy individual freedom in the market is subordinate to the constraints of a moral and social consensus insisting that there are natural levels of profit, of income, and of wealth...
...But much more onerous than this were the dreaded Test and Corporation Acts, which required all holders of offices under the British Crown to receive the sacrament according to the rites of the Anglican Church...
...The place of the laboring poor in liberal social theory is ambivalent at best...
...Like affirmative action itself, all these proposals would promote greater justice and equality...
...For all its optimism, assertiveness, and self-confidence, liberalism has another face, a frightened and fearful view of market society and the race of life as fraught with dangers, the most horrible of which, in fact, is the possibility of losing...
...The pain of being a loser consisted not so much in being hated as in being invisible...
...Is it not then possible that the distribution of valuable things to the talented is inherently unjust to those born less privileged...
...On the one hand, 17th- and 18th-century theorists saw the competitive society, the race of life, peopled only by middle-class men...
...187...
...What, then, is the right way of living...
...Of those who failed in this quest he wrote: Mankind takes no notice of him...
...Individuality became an internal subjective quality...
...And here we return to the LBJ commencement speech at Howard University...
...Central and enduring in liberalism is its unique conception of liberty and equality, rooted principally in attitudes toward work and the marketplace, toward achievement and talent...
...Their commitment is to that same liberal vision of the race of life...
...God (a very Protestant God) commanded men to work the earth, and those that were hardworking and industrious had the right to what they worked...
...Equality of opportunity, then, is historically the ideal of the revolutionary middle class, perhaps the most powerful weapon in its battle, ultimately successful, to end the rule of aristocratic privilege...
...One runs not only against the others in adjoining lanes, but against the records and achievements of those running in other races or of all those who have ever run...
...It has a distinct history...
...they are not totally socialized to be different from men...
...There are other questions Bakke and Weber do not confront: Is life truly a race...
...There is the traditional 18th-century middle-class meritocratic ideal, and there is the latter-day liberal vision of intervention in the race of life to aid and perhaps award victory to handicapped competitors...
...A doctrine originally designed to serve the class interests of the talented "have-nots" against the untalented "haves" now pits the talented 184 "haves" against the allegedly untalented "havenots...
...It ends the ability of winners to set their own prizes, to be sure, but it keeps the race intact...
...As these issues are brought into public dialogue today, centuries-old beliefs lurk between every line of the briefs, learned articles, and position papers...
...Even more far-reaching alternatives preserve the competitive race...
...What one has or gets, and therefore who one is, is no longer the appropriate reward fit to one's prescribed place...
...In historical terms, the talented class has remained the same...
...there are no limits to its use...
...Instead of "laudable ambitions," they were ruled by "romantic wavering feelings...
...They raise sensitive questions of public policy and have grave implications for how we deal with one another, blacks and whites, men and women, workers and professionals, young and old...
...Its ideology remains the same: that is why certain social policies of recent years, for instance, headstart programs, were not challenged by the meritocrats...
...Only in a moral economy 186 can the inevitable bourgeois linkage of work and success with personal identity be broken...
...The first is Beaumarchais' Marriage of Figaro, written in 1783 just before the French Revolution...
...What I am describing is, of course, the gradual liquidation of the aristocratic world and its replacement by the liberal capitalist order...
...To understand the fear and anxiety of whites and males in the face of affirmative action today one need only reread these early liberal theorists who knew very well what insecurity lurks in the heart of bourgeois man...
...Poorly paid, uneducated, starving, or sick, they could not make the best of themselves...
...It is the crusade of Figaro and Schwartzkopf...
...Runners in the race of life fear losing what they have, or losing simply, because to lose is to become a nonperson...
...Anxiety forever haunts bourgeois man...
...W V e can now better appreciate the profound impact of Bakke, Weber, and affirmative action on our lives...
...To transcend Figaro and Schwartzkopf may well require a return to some of what they in fact repudiated...
...It is just and ethical, then, for them to have as many possessions as they want (as Locke says, to "heap as much of these durable things as he pleased...
...Alongside a conviction that the laboring 182 poor are excluded from the race, that they are naturally dependent, there is in liberal theory another strain insisting that they be treated as if they were free contracting individuals, equal members of market society...
...The reasons are obvious...
...What distressed Mary Wollstonecraft, particularly, was not only that in this race the winners were always men, but that women did not even bother to run...
...What motivated men to public and economic activity was a passion for distinction, "the desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved and admired by his fellows...
...In the world of work one was the author of self...
...Anxiety over failure in the race of life, over becoming invisible, haunts today's marketplace as it did the world of Smith and Adams...
...For most of the century, it was technically illegal, for example, to carry on a Unitarian service...
...The state ought not to intervene in their behalf...
...The poor man goes out and comes in unheeded, and when in the midst of a crowd is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own house...
...Women are ambitious, he writes...
...Nobility, fortune, rank, position —you're so proud of those things...
...Locke, for example, held in his Essay on Human Understanding that "the chief, if not the only spur to human industry and action is uneasiness...
...This feeling of uneasiness, a desire for "some absent good," drives men to enterprise...
...To be free, truly self-defining, master of the self, the individual had to eliminate all barriers to that individuality...
...He feels that it...
...Bakke, Weber, and the debate over affirmative action touch upon the deepest aspects of bourgeois liberalism...
...The same can be said for instituting nonpecuniary rewards for work, effort, and achievement...
...Each of the issues raised in the current debate speaks to a part of the liberal ideological heritage...
...In the history of this crusade, we can discern familiar philosophic benchmarks...
...there is no equality of opportunity when freedom to realize oneself through success and achievement is impaired, and this occurs whenever ethical, religious, or social limitations are placed on economic activity, whenever governments interfere in the race by favoring some privileged class, whose members could not win on their own...
...John Stuart Mill in his essay The Subjugation of Women (1860) offers the classic plea that equality of opportunity be extended to women...
...we refuse to admit any longer the rights of the indolent aristocracy, we repudiate the class distinctions of the present day, we desire that all men should be free and equal...
...In short, the liberal revolution has passed them by...
...Is this being done not in terms of talent but to meet political considerations...
...What whites and men fear in the loss of wealth and status is what the poor, women, and blacks have experienced throughout liberal hegemony...
...The dissenters operated at the margins of English life in the 18th century...
...The race, the competition, the illusion that everyone can win, and the alleged pleasures of victory are all necessary and worthwhile deceptions...
...What if our talents are in fact ascriptive, given to us by dint not of our worth and intrinsic achievements or merit, but simply, as Figaro and Schwartzkopf noted, by our being born...
...They are permanently cursed, wrote Locke, with "an itch after honour, power, and riches," which in turn unleashes more "fantastical uneasiness...
...Fear and anxiety," Smith wrote, are the "two great tormentors of the human breast...
...The revolutionary bourgeois attitude is best expressed in two famous cultural documents...
...It is a race...
...Unlike affirmative action, giving children intensive and special preschooling is quite compatible with simply making the race fair...
...But the continuous liberal commitment to individuality and equal opportunity persists in Green's writings...
...A market economy is inevitably a race...
...Life should be neither a race nor a chain of being...
...Writing at the turn of the 20th century when these values would be assaulted on the left and right (as he so beautifully depicted in his Magic Mountain), Mann's sense of liberalism is the same as Beaumarchais's...
...Every individual, Smith wrote, "seeks to better his own condition...
...Can groups or individuals ever be in a truly competitive position leading to equal opportunity...
...What Green did in the 1870s was, in fact, to call upon the doctrine of equal opportunity to assist the working-class cause...
...We can readily recognize T. H. Green's vision as the ideology of the American New Deal in the 20th century...
...II Life as a race becomes the central metaphor in liberal ideology...
...But they are liberals...
...Their own enterprise and ability mattered...
...They were perceived as creatures of status and told to accept their dependent place...
...That moment was, of course, the grand transformation wrought in the Europe of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries by the rise of Protestantism and capitalism...
...While we, however hard we strive, cannot climb to their level...
...This means that some appealing suggestions for changing public policy premised on this view would have to be called inadequate...
...This is clearly how Locke and Smith perceived the working class, and why many writers opposed education for the poor lest they become discontented and seek ambitiously to join or even replace their middle-class betters...
...Is past injustice a more solid moral basis of desert than talent...
...Since metaphors have hovered closely over these reflections, let me end by offering another...
...Is a race with winners and losers ever fair or moral, no matter how equal the conditions at the starting line...
...In play fulfillment and joy is a product of the common purpose, the shared experience...
...with access to jobs and high status...
...But merit, talent, virtue, and ability are, alas, no sure indicators of success, because government is too involved in the race, according to Smith...
...Moral goodness," he wrote, "will ensure that the property of each is made to serve the use of all...
...Smith saw in bourgeois man a constant striving...
...Is life a marketplace...
...This was shorthand for America and there, indeed, Priestley went, emigrating to Pennsylvania in 1794...
...A society of Stakhanovites is no more congenial, for by definition it assumes the continuation of the race, albeit for lower stakes...
...To exclude us from jobs is no more reasonable than to exclude all those above five feet high or those whose birthdays are before the summer solstice...
...What would America look like if random chance distributed as many valuable things as test scores did...
...It was no favor she asked, but "a natural and inalienable right," which she claimed...
...Public interests and social needs, not individual free choices in the pursuit of private gain, would be the organizing principle of a moral economic life...
...The unlimited acquisition of money and wealth, he argues, is neither unjust nor morally wrong...
...This came much later (not, indeed, until deep into this century) in America...
...Even if the unproductive aristocratic social order were eliminated and the race could be run with equal opportunity for all, only some would win...
...Once that ideal had involved emancipating the individual from feudal restrictions, opening up the market...
...Difficult as it may be, the time has come to abandon our old and dear friends, Figaro and Schwartzkopf...
...Are winners real people and losers deservedly unnoticed and invisible...
...The problem is that they are barred from market society...
...Figaro's and Schwartzkopf's liberal vision of an ideal society is still with us, especially in America...
...Men rule like aristocrats, regardless of their merit, simply because they have taken the trouble to be born...
...Life is no longer a hierarchical ladder or chain of being...
...They involve the realization of self through work...
...it should be understood as a kind of play...
...The first great utopian thinker knew already that such an ideal was morally unsatisfactory...
...III I n the 19th century, two important social groups called upon this doctrine of equal opportunity: women, again, and the working class...
...This is not to advocate an updated Consciousness III, but to offer the heretical suggestion that a sense of identity can come just as meaningfully from play, love, spirituality, place or affiliation, as from work...
...they could not compete on equal terms...
...They spoke for a dissenter community very much involved in the creation of a new England...
...Might this calculation not be made in other areas of society as well, with greater justice and equality flowing from less obsession with meritocracy...
...Mill's essay is one long plea for the extension of liberal emancipation to women...
...You do not take a person, who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up the starting line of a race and then say "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair...
...We want civil offices...
...God and nature have forbidden it...
...They have no opportunity to be or do anything else, no internal subjective mastery and direction of self...
...This may take the form of ideological myth, rags to riches, Horatio Alger, and so on, or a more commonplace defense of laissez-faire...
...The issue was "power, place and influence...
...Similarly, the lower185 ing of stakes inherent in proposals that would narrow the range of prizes is mere tinkering...
...It is built around the conflict between the great aristocrat Count Almaviva and the commoner, the hardworking, industrious barber, Figaro...
...Why should not the fair field of generous competition be freely opened to every one...
...a moral economy can be play...
...Just as affirmative action temporarily introduces moral purpose and public good into the market economy while restricting the play of free choice, so the solution to most of our contemporary ills requires public restraint of market freedom...
...Smith has no illusions, however...
...According to the theory, those that win do so because they are more talented and work harder than the losers...
...Here is the real source of contemporary tension...
...Another victim has surely been the moral sense of self...
...They are whatever their hard work can get...
...T. H. Green is, in fact, an intellectual ancestor of all those defenders of state action from the New Deal to the present whom Americans describe in their own peculiar way as liberals...
...What has happened, however, is that it has changed from a revolutionary class to the status quo defender of a new elite, the meritocracy...
...Expanding the number of places in medical schools or the number of medical schools themselves, providing more jobs in the building trades, more jobs for faculty in an expanded system of higher education—all these are no doubt desirable, but in the end they serve merely to enlarge the field of runners...
...The ideal of equality of opportunity at its origins was both an effort to reduce inequality and to perpetuate it...
...In the Buddenbrooks Mann gives a much more vivid summary of these basic liberal beliefs than did Beaumarchais: his 19th-century liberal revolutionary Morten Schwartzkopf is speaking, criticizing a friend who has just spoken well of an aristocratic acquaintance: 178 They need only to be born to be the pick of everything, and look down on all the rest of us...
...Nothing could be further from their intentions...
...Central to this transformation were new conceptions of self and work...
...These are arbitrary and whimsical distinctions...
...Thomas Walker, a Manchester cotton manufacturer, dissenting layman and political activist, summed up the essence of this new radical creed in 1794: We do not seek an equality of wealth and possessions, but an equality of rights...
...The sense of self in a moral economy comes not from success or failure in the competitive market but from the identification with and the quest to realize the collective moral purpose to which individual economic activity is ultimately subject...
...These early bourgeois ideologues were extremely sensitive lest their assault on hierarchy and aristocratic privilege be construed as a mere leveling to an absolute equality of conditions...
...A moral and natural economy, according to Aristotle, could well blend private ownership of property with public and common use...
...They were expected to accept their place as dependent subordinates barred from the race...
...The liberal state, then, as Locke never tires of telling us, is really constructed by property-owning individuals to protect their property...
...Adam Smith's great contribution to the liberal theory of equality of opportunity was his conviction that at bottom all men were ambitious...
...And this race should be fair...
...Equality of opportunity presumes that people have different abilities and talents...
...To be a loser is to be invisible, according to Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiment: What are the advantages which we propose by that great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition...
...What we seek is that all may be equally entitled to the protection and benefit of society, may equally have a voice in elections...
...They are free individuals who can raise themselves by talent and hard work, just as their employers have done...
...Exclusion from public jobs meant that legions of these talented dissenters were denied one of the most important rewards of the successful, prestigious positions in the military or civil establishment...
...Barbauld articulates the very core of liberal-bourgeois social theory...
...Only education and political rights could fit them for the race...
...They are not allowed to achieve, to compete freely, to have the status they want...
...A convincing case can be made (as it was 20 years ago by Sheldon Wolin) that liberal social theorists of the 17th and 18th centuries presumed fear and anxiety to be the basic motive in human nature that first sets men and women running—or, in Smith's words, "rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind...
...A moral economy in the 1980s requires restricting the freedom of economic actors...
...once driven to the race they never lose their uneasiness...
...it never spoils...
...one of the great themes of feminism from Wollstonecraft to this day is equal access to education...
...They are much more than political bombshells...
...It would involve a fundamental abandonment of our sense of life as a competitive race...
...He is not disapproved, censured, or reproached, he is only not seen...
...It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind...
...the poor man, on the contrary, is ashamed of his poverty...
...Since God has given "different degrees of industry" to men, some have more talent, and work harder than others...
...The fiery Anna Barbauld, another dissenter, did not leave, however, and in making her case for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1790 she addressed the social issue straight on...
...Plato wrote: Every man and every woman should live life accordingly, and play the noblest games, and be of another mind from what they are at present...
...The play, of course, was the basis of Mozart's opera...
...They turn away their eyes from him...
...Are fundamental beliefs about individual responsibility for achievement and success being violated...
...What have you done to deserve so many rewards...
...Individuals increasingly came to define themselves as active subjects...
...The race is not fair...
...But the doctrine of equal opportunity has occupied a central place in liberal ideology from the 17th century to the present, and the metaphor of life as a race was used centuries before Johnson's speech at Howard University...
...This meant public schools, factory laws, prohibition, and public health...
...He rambles and wanders unheeded...
...with privilege and the state...
...But men are ever fearful...
...So subversive were these sentiments that the play was banned and only surfaced again in France after the Revolution had dealt even more definitively with the Almavivas...
...They are concerned with the marketplace, open or closed...
...Ascription, the assignment to some preordained rank in life, came more and more to be replaced by achievement as the major definer of personal identity...
...Woman," she wrote in her Vindication, was just like the useless aristocrat "in her self complete" possessed of "all those frivolous accomplishments...
...It has always been a part of the historical legacy of liberal ideology...
...Abandoning the worship of talent and merit might also introduce new attitudes to work...
...people are as the market values them...
...Equal opportunity was their subversive weapon against the world of privilege...
...Can past privations be countered by eliminating present competitive disadvantages...
...The time has come to go beyond the framework of the current debate and question the very metaphors and assumptions that inform both it and the problems it has created...
...The liberal model endures in T. H. Green...
...How essential is the expert medical education sought by Bakke to the health needs of inner cities or rural America...
...Only that all have had an equal oportunity to have more...
...But "let all mankind start fair in the race of life...
...Interfering with other runners or seizing special advantages is "a violation of fair play...
...John Adams repeated this judgment on failure 132 years later in his Discourses on Davila...
...Life, he wrote, was a "race for wealth and honours and preferements...
...One possible way to transcend the world of Figaro and Schwartzkopf is a retreat from meritocracy itself, a tabooed subject for intellectuals whose very place in society may well be owed to that principle...
...One does not eat money...
...It was egalitarian at its birth because it lashed out at the exclusiveness of aristocratic privilege, but it sought to replace an aristocratic elite with a new elite, albeit one more broadly based on talent and merit...
...There would remain obvious differences in how each was able to "better his own condition...
...Workers are surely free individuals, and if they contract for low or subsistence wages or for long hours, it's their own voluntary act...
Vol. 28 • April 1981 • No. 2
