The Egalitarian Plateau

Abstract

One of the most beguiling claims made by Dworkin in his extensive writings on political values is the claim that the vast bulk of contemporary political philosophy is built upon egalitarian foundations; that virtually every normative theory of social arrangement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shares an assumption of equality. His basic contention is that a great many very different political theories can be presented as competing interpretations of the same abstract egalitarian principle, namely, that every citizen has a right to be treated with equal concern and respect by his or her own government. According to Dworkin, this principle can be thought to provide ‘a kind of plateau in political argument’ (Dworkin, 1983, p. 25).