ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to show how equality is related to sameness and how useful it is to distinguish the essentially descriptive considerations in the meaning of "equality" from any question of the desirability, fairness, or justice of equality. It offers a review of egalitarian thought, organized around the notion of radical egalitarianism, in order to see where the plea for the greatest possible equality among men breaks down. Egalitarians have had a certain understandable wariness of the uniformity and conformity connoted by "equality". Nearly a century ago, Fitzjames Stephen, the conservative utilitarian critic of egalitarianism, complained that "equality is a word so wide and vague as to be by itself almost unmeaning". Radical egalitarianism is seldom formulated and rarely, if ever, discussed because its absurdities as a social ideal—not only moral but conceptual and factual absurdities—are too plainly apparent. Karl Popper has said that "the egalitarian principle proper" is "the proposal to eliminate 'natural' privileges".
