EGALITARIANISM

This is a splendid review. It examines notions of Americanism from a Europeon perspective.

http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25346-2334832,00.html


Claus Offe’s return to the sociological classics is a reminder of how complicated the concept of equality is. Egalitarians today tend to think of it in distributional terms. The classics saw it as a matter of rights and liberty, and warned against reducing the great idea of equality to a quest for goods. Their challenge, translated to present day conditions, is this: are propenents of the European social model obsessed with little inequalities at the cost of ignoring the big ones? As an egalitarian, I am uneasy about not being able to dismiss that question.The European social model needs to be challenged more than protected. The way to do that is not for Europeans to turn inwards, but to take their model to the world and submit it to competitive testing. There is more to see in America than a threatening world power; there is also a social model that continues to put trust in voluntarism, and with much success – look again to the American universities. It is a good idea for us in Europe to maintain a healthy curiosity about the peculiarities of American social life.