First Among Equals: Visions of Equality Before Egalitarianism with Teresa M. Bejan (Harvard UP, 2026)

Yeah.

Can we talk about that more? I mean, you mentioned kind of a particular moment in the ancient Roman world, but you do discuss more broadly kind of what equality meant in ancient Greece and ancient Rome.

Can we cover that a little bit?

Yeah, absolutely.

So basically, what I discovered and sort of how I start the book is that the modern assumption that – this is what I call the egalitarian argument.

So the egalitarian argument goes like this.

So the equality of human beings as such – grounds their political equality as citizens so we seem to we always assume that there must be a tight connection on the one hand between a belief in human equality and a commitment to democracy as the consummate expression of political equality um So what I do in the first chapter in the book is kind of to show how that is just not how political equality was understood to work in the ancient world and specifically in democratic Athens, which is where we very often look when we want to kind of tell the story of where democracy comes from.

So in the book, I show that.

Well, we tend to think of equality primarily as a mathematical or even kind of arithmetic concept, so that it's about numerical identity, quantitative identity.

Each one should count for one and no one more than one, to sort of borrow from Bentham.

In the ancient world, equality was understood actually primarily as a relationship of balance.

And the important image here was the image of the scale or the weighing balances that merchants would use in the Bronze Age marketplace in order to weigh trade goods.

But actually, originally, these scales were used primarily to weigh precious metals because these were the precious metals used in payment.

So the idea of equality, so in Greek, isotes, in Latin, equalitas, was...

Understood as being a kind of reflection of the well calibrated and then balanced scale.

So the equal was really the balance.

And what this meant politically was that you got these very long running controversies in Greek political thought and then later in Roman political thought.

about political equality in the sense of balancing the body politic.

How do we bring a political community together made up of these unequal parts? So think about the rich versus the poor, the few versus the many, the virtuous versus the vicious.

How do we balance these parts of the body politics so that no one part can dominate? And this very famously in Athens leads to a fairly well-developed debate, and we know about this debate primarily through Aristotle's politics, about different sort of balancing strategies.

What is the right idea of political equality that we should use in order to balance the commonwealth? So Democrats balance.

favor what Aristotle calls an arithmetic understanding.

In the book, I characterize this primarily as an understanding of equality as indifference, by which I mean we treat people equally by refusing to take their differences into account.

And so the model of political equality here is not voting in the assembly.

It's the democratic device of sortition or lotteries, the idea that the equal way of deciding how to allot offices is to distribute them randomly by chance.

Yeah.

Can we talk about that more? I mean, you mentioned kind of a particular moment in the ancient Roman world, but you do discuss more broadly kind of what equality meant in ancient Greece and ancient Rome.

Can we cover that a little bit?

Yeah, absolutely.

So basically, what I discovered and sort of how I start the book is that the modern assumption that – this is what I call the egalitarian argument.

So the egalitarian argument goes like this.

So the equality of human beings as such – grounds their political equality as citizens so we seem to we always assume that there must be a tight connection on the one hand between a belief in human equality and a commitment to democracy as the consummate expression of political equality um So what I do in the first chapter in the book is kind of to show how that is just not how political equality was understood to work in the ancient world and specifically in democratic Athens, which is where we very often look when we want to kind of tell the story of where democracy comes from.

So in the book, I show that.

Well, we tend to think of equality primarily as a mathematical or even kind of arithmetic concept, so that it's about numerical identity, quantitative identity.

Each one should count for one and no one more than one, to sort of borrow from Bentham.

In the ancient world, equality was understood actually primarily as a relationship of balance.

And the important image here was the image of the scale or the weighing balances that merchants would use in the Bronze Age marketplace in order to weigh trade goods.

But actually, originally, these scales were used primarily to weigh precious metals because these were the precious metals used in payment.

So the idea of equality, so in Greek, isotes, in Latin, equalitas, was...

Understood as being a kind of reflection of the well calibrated and then balanced scale.

So the equal was really the balance.

And what this meant politically was that you got these very long running controversies in Greek political thought and then later in Roman political thought.

about political equality in the sense of balancing the body politic.

How do we bring a political community together made up of these unequal parts? So think about the rich versus the poor, the few versus the many, the virtuous versus the vicious.

How do we balance these parts of the body politics so that no one part can dominate? And this very famously in Athens leads to a fairly well-developed debate, and we know about this debate primarily through Aristotle's politics, about different sort of balancing strategies.

What is the right idea of political equality that we should use in order to balance the commonwealth? So Democrats balance.

favor what Aristotle calls an arithmetic understanding.

In the book, I characterize this primarily as an understanding of equality as indifference, by which I mean we treat people equally by refusing to take their differences into account.

And so the model of political equality here is not voting in the assembly.

It's the democratic device of sortition or lotteries, the idea that the equal way of deciding how to allot offices is to distribute them randomly by chance.