Most people think of equality as a modern idea. Americans, especially, are fond of citing the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson’s “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.” Here, they suppose, was a radical new notion, a principle universal in scope, even if the Founders failed to apply it fully at the time. Scholars, for their part, differ about the exact point of origin. But they also generally agree that equality is a recent invention. As David Graeber and David Wengrow note in their best-selling The Dawn of Everything, prior to the 17th and 18th centuries the concept of social equality “simply did not exist.”
In truth, however, the concept had existed for a long time. Jefferson acknowledged that the Declaration drew from sources going back to antiquity that had helped form the “common sense” of the 18th century. Thomas Paine, who knew something about common sense, agreed. “The equality of man, so far from being a modern doctrine, is the oldest upon record,” he affirmed in his book Rights of Man, noting that “the Mosaic account of the creation was fully consistent with the “unity or equality of man.” In 1776, the Founders’ close ally, the French duke Louis Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld, added in his Lettre d’un banquier de Londres à M. that the proposition that “all men are created equal” was a long“established truth” of religion. What these 18th century observers understood is what too many have since forgotten or failed to see: equality has a long history. By uncovering its religious and pre-revolutionary past, we can catch a glimpse of the ambiguous legacy its bequeathed to the future.
In fact, many of the world’s religions develop ideas about equality. But in the U.S. it was the Jewish and Christian traditions that did the most to establish its deep foundations. As the rabbi and scholar Joshua A. Berman has argued, the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, establishes the bases of a new social, political, and religious order “founded on egalitarian ideals.” God’s original covenant was made with the Jewish people, without distinctions of class or caste. That planted the seed of the principle of equality before the law, and it ennobled ordinary men and women, who were conceived as God’s children.