extraordinary amount of our political history.

How are we to resolve the

contradiction of immense inequalities in a society that claims to be founded
on equality?
There are two possibilities. We might say that it was all a fake, a set of
slogans meant to replace a regime of aristocrats with a regime of wealth and
privilege of a different sort, that inequality in our society is structural and an
integral aspect of the whole of our political and social life. To say that,
however, would be deeply subversive, because it would call for yet another
revolution if we wanted to make good on our hopes for liberty and equality
for all. It is not a popular idea among teachers, newspaper editors, college
professors, successful politicians, indeed anyone who has the power to help
form public consciousness.
The alternative, which has been the one taken since the beginning of the
nineteenth century, has been to put a new gloss on the notion of equality.
Rather than equality of result, what has been meant is equality of
opportunity. In this view of equality, life is a foot race. In the bad old days
of the ancien rgime, the aristocrats got to start at the finish line whereas all
the rest of us had to start at the beginning, so the aristocrats won. In the new
society, the race is fair: everyone is to begin at the starting line and everyone
has an equal opportunity to finish first. Of course, some people are faster
runners than others, and so some get the rewards and others don't. This is the
view that the old society was characterized by artificial barriers to equality,
whereas the new society allows a natural sorting process to decide who is to
get the status, wealth, and power and who is not.
Such a view does not threaten the status quo, but on the contrary supports it
by telling those who are without power that their position is the inevitable
outcome of their own innate deficiencies and that, therefore, nothing can be
done about it. A remarkably explicit recent statement of this assertion is the
one by Richard Herrnstein, a psychologist from Harvard, who is one of the
most outspoken modern ideologues of natural inequality. He wrote,
The privileged classes of the past were probably not much superior
biologically to the downtrodden which is why revolution had a fair chance
of success. By removing artificial barriers between classes society has
encouraged the creation of biological barriers. When people can take their