ABSTRACT
Fran Tonkiss focuses on the problems of reshaping progressive agendas for a context which features difference. In a contested postmodern environment where all issues are embedded in mulitple discourses, what justification can exist for social justice programs based, as they have been, on universal norms such as ‘human rights’ or ‘natural’ equality before the law?
She focuses on the need to reshape the mainstream left in European politics in order to make citizenship viable under postmodern conditions. She argues in this chapter on ‘Rewriting Equality’ that ‘the politics of difference, rather than negating the concept of equality, would require it’. As problems of cultural, ethnic, national and other difference have become acute, equality increasingly becomes a social, not a legal matter; and social equality involves forms of recognition that are not necessarily part of legal equality. It is in the area of social equality – not an arena of central concern in post-socialist Britain – that postmodernity offers an idea of equality that is sufficiently complex for contemporary social circumstances. Some of these circumstances share early modern concerns about the moral basis of social order.
