The recent, crisp articulation of ‘Non-Intrinsic Egalitarianism’ emerged out of the critique of the influential distinction between ‘Telic’ and ‘Deontic’ egalitarianisms. Part of the promise of this approach is that it can be deployed in order to reintegrate these recent philosophical debates about equality with much older currents in the history of political thought. The paper explains how the century of argument in England and France after 1650 created the intellectual space for the kind of presentation of Non-Intrinsic Egalitarian ideas such as we find in Rousseau’s major political writings from the 1750s and afterwards. In so doing, the paper illustrates the striking extent to which fundamental political-theoretical disagreements are often driven not so much by competing normative commitments as by divergent understandings of how those commitments ramify through the sociological and institutional possibilities that disputants imagine are plausibly open to them.N/
