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Books

The Roots of Equality by Lantz Miller

Frederik Kaufman examines a theory of the origins of equality.

The Roots of Equality (2023) is an extraordinarily wide-ranging, sophisticated, and deeply informed study of the origins of the idea of social equality and why it matters to us now. While the book is not for the faint of heart, being fairly academic, a straightforward theme runs through it: “the condition of social equality has been a part of human life for virtually the entire existence of the species… Humans thus respond with outrage at injustice if equality is markedly diminished” (p.15). Miller notes that the overwhelming history of our species was spent as nomadic foragers, and argues that such societies embraced a kind of social equality studied by anthropologists which is often seen in hunter-gatherer societies today, that includes such features as cooperation, sharing, gender parity, and autonomy, among other traits (p.63).

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