ABSTRACT
The rise of egalitarian values and associated egalitarian institutional reforms is a distinctive feature of modernity and postmodernity. This development, which dates at least to the Enlightenment, intensified throughout the twentieth century as formal legal rights were extended to previously excluded groups (e.g., women), wide-reaching institutional reforms were implemented to equalize life chances (e.g., bureaucratic personnel policies), and anti-egalitarian doctrines (e.g., racism) were challenged. These processes of equalization, dramatic though they are, obviously do not exhaust the story of modernity and postmodernity. As is well known, this story is replete with counterpoints at which the forces for egalitarianism have been resisted, sometimes violently (as with recurrences of eugenics and fascism) and sometimes in quieter but still profound ways (as in the persistence of residential segregation).
