Acknowledging Equality: Respect and Contempt in 17th-Century English Political Thought

Description

Part of the CRASSH Fellows Work in Progress Seminar Series.  All welcome but please email Michelle Maciejewska to book your place and to request readings.  A sandwich lunch and refreshments are provided.

Dr Teresa M Bejan

As the core premise of modern moral and political philosophy, equality often demands more allegiance than investigation. The question of its historical emergence as a social and political ideal is generally set aside in favor of identifying the causal and constitutive harms of various forms of inequality—whether political, social, or economic—in the present. But here, normative and empirical approaches have converged in explicating in/equality in terms of two other concepts, respect and contempt, that are themselves more often invoked than understood.  This lecture will explore ideas of equality—as a political principle, a religious commitment, and a social practice—in seventeenth-century England, in the context of debates wherein these concepts were also paramount.  Taking Hobbes’s theory of natural equality as a premise to be “acknowledged” rather than a descriptive reality as its starting point, the lecture will focus on how Hobbes drew on and transformed the distinctive forms of egalitarian claim-making practiced by his radical Protestant contemporaries, whose insistence that “God was no respecter of persons” issued in strong, direct, and disruptive challenges to existing social hierarchies. Foremost were the Quakers, who assailed directly the social performance of respect in the name of individuals’ equal status as bearers of the inner light. Their refusal to pay “hat honor” and their insistence on the “uncouth, strange, and Immodest” practice of “feeling and grabling”—i.e. shaking—hands scandalized contemporaries, who recognized this deliberate denial of “respective” behavior appropriate to different ranks as a strategic politics of contempt meant to bring the high low, and the low high.  Despite their differences, then, both Hobbes and the Quakers demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the ways in which hierarchy is constituted, protected, and internalized through the showing (or withholding) of respect. This fascinating but forgotten understanding of “equality before egalitarianism” sheds light on the development of a central concept in modern political thought while providing some analytical clarity and historical insight into the relationship between equality, respect, and contempt sorely missing in contemporary debates.