Introduction:
Equality as the Great Modern Myth

Equality is therefore at once the most natural thing, and the most chimerical.

Voltaire, 'Equality', Philosophical Dictionary (1764)1

I was born on the Left. My father was a lifelong communist, and hoped that I would follow in his footsteps. And so, very early on, he enrolled me in the Israeli Communist Youth movement. I grew up in the poverty-stricken Jaffa of the 1950s, a decade which saw the rise of anti-communism in Israel. Every year on 1 May, I marched dressed in a white shirt and red scarf. Out in the middle of the crowd, I would be worried sick about being spotted by other boys from my class, who I knew would then bully me at school. But then the fact that I was walking alongside other boys and girls - including one girl with whom I happened to be in love - would ease my fears somewhat, and I would feel quite the little hero.

The truth is that the boy I was in those distant days is still alive inside me. And yet, as early as 1968, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops prompted me to break all ties with the communist movement. And, of course, the subsequent realization of the horrific legacy of the revolutions of the twentieth century did not exactly encourage me to return to it. And yet I continue to think as a man of the Left: some of the faults of my writing, and perhaps some of its qualities, can be attributed to that original political stance, which I am still not prepared to give up. Despite all of the disappointments occasioned by the deviations and failures of the social struggles of the twentieth century, a great gulf remains between the values that drive the Left in all its various forms and those that fuel right-wingers of all stripes.

I grew up in a family of modest means. My mother was a cleaning lady, my father a nightwatchman. When I was 16, I was obliged to abandon my studies to become a manual worker until my military service, and it was not until the age of 24 that I decided to take my school-leaving exam and enrol at university. Later, having obtained a doctorate, I found a position as a lecturer which allowed me to teach and do research. I like to think that the fact that I was in contact with members of the working class and was close to a number of movements on the organized Left prevented me from ever idealizing the topics of my research.

After many years teaching at Tel Aviv University, today, as Professor Emeritus, I enjoy the material benefits of the middle class. Unwilling to forget my past, however, I remain very conscious that most human beings find themselves in a far worse situation than myself, and struggle hard every day to improve their lives and those of their children. Even as I write these words, I have just read in the paper that half of the world's population survives on less than 5 dollars a day. Most of us never meet these people - which is no coincidence.

Not far from where I live, there are folk whose basic civil, political, and social rights have been denied for fifty-four years. We hardly ever see these Palestinians, and when they do manage to find work in Israel, often as construction workers on meagre wages, they are usually transparent or invisible, perched on scaffolding high above us, and we hear about them only when they fall off and plummet down onto the sidewalk. This is one of the sources of my constant attention to social history and its political expressions - constant, and biased. As the British philosopher Bertrand Russell said, 'a man without bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such a man exists'. I fully share his view on this matter.

The End of the Left?

I am writing this text at a time when organized leftist movements around the world are in serious decline. Social movements still exist, and citizen rebellions continue to shake up many regimes, but this is not being translated into a gain in power on the part of traditional left-wing parties, or in the creation of dynamic left-wing movements.

Hegel told us that 'the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk', meaning that a historical process can only be understood in retrospect, at the moment when it is at an end. Does this principle apply to the worldwide Left today? I am not sure, and this book is a reflection of my uncertainty. Requiems for the Left have been pronounced dozens of times already, but, like a phoenix, it is repeatedly reborn from the ashes, in unexpected places and at unexpected moments. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the Left seems increasingly old and tired: its ideological arms tremble and grope as it tries to grasp the future. But before deciding whether it's time to bury it once and for all, it is important to take a brief look at the many faces the Left has worn and the metamorphoses it has undergone over the years.

At this point in the book, I am not going to put forward any unambiguous or over-restrictive definition of 'the Left' as a concept. Philosophers, historians, and political scientists have all tried to give such a definition, but they all tend to use the term in different ways. It has also taken on different meanings depending on the era and geographical context. In my opinion, the concept of 'the Left', like that of 'Capital', should be seen as denoting not a thing or an essence, but a relationship between things, a phenomenon whose meaning is always relative. Every left has a right, and likewise every right has its left wing. Moreover, this relational dynamic has altered significantly over the last two centuries.

We know that the appearance of the terms 'Left' and 'Right' was a quite contingent occurrence. When, on 28 August 1789, the newly formed National Constituent Assembly of France set out to deliberate on whether to maintain the king's right of veto over the decisions of the nation's elected representatives, opponents of the proposal gathered on the left side of the room, while supporters assembled on the right. But it would be several years before this left/right division became current in wider circles and took on its full meaning.

What were the initial criteria for this classification? What does the existence of the 'Left' on a global scale owe to this particular historical moment? Concepts usually take root when new representations emerge, but that does not mean that the birth of these concepts is perfectly consistent with the emergence of the phenomena themselves. In the case of 'the Left', the emergence of the concept must be viewed in parallel with that of 'equality', which at the time was taking hold in human consciousness. And the concept of equality always referred to 'things' different from one another, not to a 'thing' in itself.

During the French Revolution, 'equality' was one of the three great values brandished by the insurgents, along with 'liberty' and 'fraternity'. In the revolutionary trinity, 'liberty' comes before 'equality' - probably because it is a far older concept. According to biblical myth, the Sons of Israel escaped from slavery to claim their liberty; and during the slave revolts in Rome, a resounding demand for liberty was often heard. In fact, within Mediterranean civilization, the notion had been a subject of debate since antiquity: Aristotle dealt with it in detail as early as the fifth century BCE (he also discussed equality, but only between free men). In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes took up the subject, in the form of the question of the liberty of subjects to accept voluntarily the domination of the lord. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the concept of liberty was increasingly defended by right-wing figures. For example, when Nazism was defeated, liberty was a central tenet of the political doctrines of both the Left and the Right in Europe. Indeed, the liberal Right has always accused the Left of posing a threat to civil and political liberties . and has not always been entirely wrong in doing so.

As for the all-important idea of fraternity, its origins lie principally in the Christian tradition; in other words, in the notions of love, pity, and charity towards the weak and the poor. Although the modern Left has adopted the notion in the form of 'solidarity', it cannot claim any monopoly on it. Nations have always been built on some sense of brotherhood between citizens. In all modern wars, for example, the brotherhood of combatants has been a cornerstone in the construction of national sentiment.

Equality among all humans, on the other hand, must be understood as a central notion when trying to decipher the historical appearance of the Left. In early agricultural societies, equality was not defined as a moral goal. No trace of it is to be found in the great hydraulic empires (from Mesopotamia to Imperial China), nor in the slave societies of the Mediterranean (Greece and Rome), nor in the feudal European countries (from England to Russia). Similarly - although many believers may not want to hear this - none of the monotheistic religions ever raised any objection in principle to slavery. The 'former slaves of Egypt' we read about in the Bible had themselves become legitimate slave owners in the Holy Land. Christians did not object to slavery either, and in their view the salvation of the soul always took precedence over that of the body. As for the Quran, although it...