Introduction

This chapter is about the very long-term destiny of equality and egalitarianism, where equality between women and men is regarded as an integrated aspect. Taking an imagined immortal bird's eye view on the question, one gets sight of two seemingly contrasting processes. On the one hand, there is spontaneously growing inequality, although partly offset by some counteracting trends. On the other hand, there is a gradual long-term expansion and the ever more widespread presence of egalitarian visions of how human society should be organised. Such visions are not being cancelled out by anti-egalitarian world views, which, nonetheless, never seem to become extinct either. To formulate this even more distinctly, one would be inclined to state that an innate need for equality among humans is as evident as a trend towards the opposite in real life.

In his classical treatise Equality, originally published in 1931, R. H. Tawney once succinctly expressed this inconsistency:

How come inequality seems to go hand in hand with egalitarianism? That is the question discussed below that will hopefully be more energetically addressed by the community of researchers than it is today.

The equality–inequality gradient

It is likely that, in the absence of political initiatives, the spontaneous development of society in the long run would lead to continuously widening gaps in the distribution of material resources. In turn, it is suggestible that this would also condition the unequal distribution of other resources (such as health and lifespan) between social classes, as well as between women and men, young and old, and people in sparsely populated areas and people in the urban centres. As recently reported by Augusto López-Claros and Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, one rarely noticed expression of this is that there are more males than females in the world, although the opposite ‘should’ be the case.