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against the then dominant class-the nobility. The ideological con–
cepts that the bourgeoisie will forge in this struggle are universalistic
ones-they are abour
most
people and the society most people want.
New formulations about' ' human nature" will jostle with old ones and
eventually set themselves as permanent ttuths . New values, such as a
belief in the supremacy of reason , will be treated as though they have
always been the pinnacle to which men try to ascend. These ideas will
seem to be not only timeless but classless. Equality is one of them.
Equality is the aspiration of the bourgeoisie at the moment when as the
revolutionary class it represents all classes.
The liberal universalistic concept of equality, encapsulating the
highest and best aspirations of the society, is represented by these
words of Jeremy Taylor 's : "if a man be exalted by reason of any
excellence in his soul , he may please to remember that all souls are
equal, and their differing operations are because their instrument is in
I'
bettertune, their body is more healthful or better-tempered ; which is
no more praise to him than it is that he were born in Italy. " Taylor
recognizes that there are differences but these should not count. It is
this universalistic aspect of the concept that has continued in the most
ennobled liberal and social-democratic thought within capitalism;
because it is instituted as a demand of the revolutionary moment it
soars above the conditions that create it, but because this revolution is
based on these conditions- the conditions of creating two new antag–
onistic "unequal " classes-to these conditions it must eventually
return trapped by the hand that controls even its flight .
A history of the concept of equality would run in tracks very
similar to a history of feminism. First introduced as one of the
pinnacles of the new society 's ideology in revolutionary England of the
seventeenth century, the notion of equality next reached a further high
in the era of enlightenment in the eighteenth century and then with
the French Revolution . Feminism likewise has both the continuity and
the fits and starts of this trajectory. Feminism as a conscious, that is self–
conscious , protest movement, arose as part of a revolutionary bour–
geois tradition that had equality of mankind as its highest goal. The
first expressions of feminism were endowed with the strengths of the
concept of equality and circumscribed by its limitations. Feminism
arose in England in the seventeenth century as a conglomeration of
precepts and a series of demands by women who saw themselves as a
