First Among Equals: Visions of Equality Before Egalitarianism
by Teresa M. Bejan

Today, political theorists and philosophers treat as axiomatic the claim that all persons are equal. Dig deeper, however, and what we mean by equality—and what it demands from us, politically and otherwise—is far from obvious. Does it mean that we are all the same, and so the same standards should apply indifferently to everyone? Or does it mean that we are all different in ways similarly deserving of respect? These questions, and many more, reflect the profound ambiguities and contradictions that have riddled the history of the idea of equality.

First Among Equals examines a radical turning point in that history. Since antiquity, influential legal and philosophical traditions have held that all humans are fundamentally equal. Yet these claims proved surprisingly at home in a world defined by social hierarchy, political exclusion, and enslavement. In seventeenth-century England, the meaning—and practical circumstances—of equality began to change. Political philosopher Teresa Bejan (SOF 2013-14) traces this transformation, revealing how equality finally became a concrete and actionable political ideal.

Crucially, Bejan shows that influential early modern theorists of equality—chief among them Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and the early feminist Mary Astell—were responding to the increasingly radical visions proffered by contemporary social movements like the Levellers, Diggers, and Quakers. Inspired by the Leveller leader John Lilburne, these movements insisted that equality must be a basis on which ordinary men and women could demand to stand shoulder to shoulder with elites. These early modern activists and philosophers can still enchant us today, Bejan argues, while also helping us to restore the power of equality as a political ideal.

About the Author

Teresa M. Bejan (Society of Fellows 2013-2014) is Professor of Political Theory and Fellow of Oriel College at the University of Oxford. Before coming to Oxford in 2015, she taught at the University of Toronto and as a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia. She is the author of Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (2017) and First Among Equals: Visions of Equality before Egalitarianism (2026), both with Harvard University Press, as well as over two dozen academic articles and book chapters. Her work has been recognized by numerous international awards and fellowships, including the American Political Science Association’s Leo Strauss Award, the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought’s Early Career Prize, and the Leverhulme Trust’s Philip Leverhulme Prize in Politics.

About the Speakers

William Deringer (Society of Fellows 2012-2015) is an associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. His research examines the history of the numbers and calculations that organize our economic, financial, and political lives. His work ranges widely across time, from compound-interest tables in the early 1600s to computer spreadsheets on Wall Street in the 1980s. His first book, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age (Harvard University Press, 2018), is a history of how numerical “facts and figures” became seen as an especially trustworthy and powerful form of knowledge in the political realm, focusing on eighteenth-century Britain. Calculated Values was awarded the Oscar Kenshur Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Joseph Spengler Prize in the History of Economics.

Karuna Mantena is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and co-director of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought (CSPT). Karuna specializes in political theory with research interests in the theory and history of empire, South Asian politics, theory and practice of nonviolence. She is the author of Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (2010), which analyzed the transformation of nineteenth-century British imperial ideology. She is currently finishing a book on the origins and evolution of Gandhian satyagraha.

Alexis Stanley (Society of Fellows 2025-2028) received her PhD in French, with Designated Emphases in both New Media and Renaissance & Early Modern Studies, from the University of California, Berkeley in 2025. Prior to matriculation at UC Berkeley, she received degrees from Duke University and the École normale supérieure in Paris, France. Her current book project, Gestures of Enlightenment: Theatricality and Embodiment in 18th-Century France, investigates the influence the "Age of Reason" exerted on the development of theatrical techniques and literary accounts of bodily expression and gesture in France.

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