Equality

Abstract

In 1931, when R. H. Tawney first published his famous book Equality, he lamented what he called ‘The Religion of Inequality’ in British society. The problem for him, as a strong egalitarian, was not merely that extremes of income and wealth existed and that the system of social stratification preserved outmoded class distinctions, but that they were accepted as inevitable, and even approved of, by those who stood to gain most from their removal – the working classes. The people accepted the mana and karakia (Tawney, 1969, p. 35) of social and economic inequality in the same way that primitive people accept the ritual of tribal society. According to Tawney, there was no rational justification for inequality; its survival was a matter of prejudice.