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The Fear of Equality*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Robert E. Lane
Robert E. Lane
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

We move in equalitarian directions; the distribution of income flattens out; the floor beneath the poorest paid and least secure is raised and made more substantial. Since the demise of Newport and Tuxedo Park, the very rich have shunned ostentatious display. The equality of opportunity, the chance to rise in the world is at least as great today as it was thirty years ago. The likelihood of declining status is less. Where does the energy for this movement come from? Who is behind it?

Since 1848, it has been assumed that the drive for a more equalitarian society, its effective social force, would come from the stratum of society with the most to gain, the working classes. This was thought to be the revolutionary force in the world—the demand of workers for a classless society sparked by their hostility to the owning classes. It was to be the elite among the workers, not the lumpenproletariat, not the “scum,” who were to advance this movement. Just as “liberty” was the central slogan of the bourgeois revolution, so “equality” was the central concept in the working class movement. Hence it was natural to assume that whatever gains have been made in equalizing the income and status of men in our society came about largely from working class pressure.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 1959 , pp. 35 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1959

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Footnotes

*

I wish here to acknowledge the financial assistance for this study received in the form of a Faculty Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and a modest grant from the former Behavioral Sciences Division of the Ford Foundation. I also wish to thank James D. Barber and David Sears for their helpful comments on this paper. Much of the material in this paper was first presented at the American Sociological Society Annual Meeting, Seattle, August, 1958.

References

1 See Rogoff, Natalie, Recent Trends in Occupational Mobility (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953), pp. 61–63 Google Scholar.

2 Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom (New York: Rinehart, 1941)Google Scholar.

3 One way of finding out whether these working class men reported their “true feelings”—the ones which form the basis of their relevant behavior and thought—to the listening professor, is to find out how they talk to each other. Fortunately, we have some evidence on this in the transcribed protocols of discussions where two groups of three men each, selected from the fifteen reported on here, argued with each other, without an interviewer present, on the job performance of certain public officials. In these discussions the main themes reported on below are apparent. Illustrative of one of these themes is Costa's remark to Woodside and O'Hara: “If you're the business man and I'm the working man, I don't care if you make a hundred million dollars a year, as long as I make a living. In other words, you got your money invested. You're supposed to make money.” And O'Hara then chimes in “That's right.”

4 Brackets are used here and below to distinguish inferred meanings or imputed statements from direct quotations.

5 Merton, Robert K., Mass Persuasion; The Social Psychology of a War Bond Drive (New York: Harper, 1946)Google Scholar.

6 Contrast de Tocqueville: “I never met in America a citizen so poor as not to cast a glance of hope and envy on the enjoyments of the rich or whose imagination did not possess itself by anticipation of those good things that fate still obstinately withheld from him.” Democracy in America (New York: Vintage, ed.), Vol. II, p. 137 Google Scholar.

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