Sypnowich, Christine. Equality Renewed: Justice, Flourishing and the Egalitarian Ideal. New York: Routledge, 2017. Pp. 252. $155.00 (cloth)

Journal article

According to Christine Sypnowich, theorising about equality is in a bad way. The ideal of equality has come under sustained attack from theorists of ‘difference’, who focus on claims arising from the particularities of identity and culture, and view equality as a homogenising doctrine based upon a false universalism. Defenders of equality, meanwhile, have become “mired in odd debates and concerns” (221) about welfare for surfers, expensive tastes, and the precise distinction between choice and luck. To make matters worse, liberal political theory is dominated by neutralism, an “aberrant” view that is “at odds with the tradition of conceiving social justice with reference to ideas of wellbeing, the public good, and community that are so central to the ideal of equality and the hope of its realisation” (212). These various developments all conspire to leave equality beleaguered. The key to its renewal, Sypnowich argues, is a return to a focus on human flourishing or wellbeing, recasting egalitarianism in an unapologetically perfectionist vein. “It is the task of the egalitarian state to enable citizens to live worthwhile lives” (7). Sypnowich thus endeavours to defend flourishing as the proper metric of equality, responding to various objections to perfectionism along the way, and to show that this conception of equality both enables a persuasive response to theorists of difference and illuminates contemporary debates about topics such as responsibility, multiculturalism, the public good, and global justice.

Authors: Billingham, P

• Alternative title: Book Review
• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Chicago University Press
• Journal: Ethics
• Volume: 129
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 144-149
• Publication date: 2018-09-07
• Acceptance date: 2018-04-18
• DOI: 10.1086/698741
• EISSN: 1539-297X
• ISSN: 0014-1704