ABSTRACT
There are two very different ways of thinking about equality in general and thus two very different ways of thinking about political equality in particular. Equality arises not as an isolated notion but in contradiction to inequality, and initial inequalities are usually of the vulgar sort best assaulted by what the author calls lot-regarding equality. The English rotten borough, the American white primary, the racist grandfather clause, the unequally administered literacy test, the property franchise, the disenfranchisement of Jews, Catholics, and freethinkers, the asymmetries of the US electoral college—all of these and many more such things have provoked the demand for lot-regarding political equality. Naive envy gives rise to equal lots; these give rise to sophisticated envy; and this leads to a form of equality based on relevantly different treatment for relevantly different persons. Indeed, the point of such lot-regarding equality is in both cases to generate an unequal impact—to repel poor voters, and to clear away nuisance parties.
