The Strange History of the Word "Equal" - The AtlanticEqual" data-next-head=""/>

“Heaven created all persons in the same rut.” This is how one early Japanese translation of the Declaration of Independence rendered the self-evident truth mentioned in its most celebrated sentence. To many Americans, this may sound like an eccentric misunderstanding of “all men are created equal.” After all, the egalitarian arithmetic of the Declaration’s claim seems clear enough: Every person carries the same weight. How else could colonists claim equality with the King and hold him to account?<br>But this Japanese translator realized something important: When Thomas Jefferson set pen to paper in the summer of 1776, the meaning of the adjective equal was less self-evident than its mathematical associations suggest. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language had listed no fewer than eight definitions, including “like another in bulk, excellence, or any other quality that admits comparison,” “in just proportion,” and “upon the same terms.”<br>Applied to political matters, many of Johnson’s definitions directly contradicted one another—in ways that still matter today. “In just proportion” summarizes what modern liberals and progressives have in mind when they argue for policies such as affirmative action. Respecting people as equals, they believe, sometimes means taking racial differences into account. Meanwhile, many conservatives gravitate toward “upon the same terms.” In their view, being equal means that people are the same in all ways that matter legally; policies built on group differences must therefore be rejected as treating people unequally before the law.<br>Many contemporary controversies boil down to a simple disagreement over which particular definition of equal applies. And there is much to debate, given how many social inequalities Jefferson and his co-authors left behind.<br>The Founders were hardly the first or the last egalitarians to conclude that some members of society were, as George Orwell put it, “more equal than others.” The Declaration’s reference to creation points us all the way back to the Book of Genesis, in which God creates men and women “in his own image.” But this divine similarity evidently did nothing to preclude slavery, patriarchy, and the many other social hierarchies depicted elsewhere in the Bible. Likewise, human equality was nowhere to be found in democratic Athens, where only native-born Athenian men were recognized politically as one another’s peers.<br>From the November 2025 issue: Whose independence?<br>In the early third century, a Roman imperial jurist named Ulpian declared that “as far as concerns the natural law, all humans are equal.” But he didn’t mean that all humans (male or female, slave or free) should be afforded equal rights. His point was that, much like the sun or rain or death, the laws of nature fell indifferently on everyone, regardless of their wealth or status.<br>For the next millennium and a half, claims about equality proved remarkably consistent with sexism and slavery, as well as monarchy and universal empire. For most of our forebears, the claim that all humans were “upon the same terms” in the eyes of God simply did not mean that they were also sufficiently alike in excellence to be treated as social or political equals. Indeed, as in modern meritocracy, a major purpose of emphasizing human beings’ intrinsic equality was to make excuses for their unequal fates. If some people suffered or lost out, they must have done something to deserve it.<br>Only in 17th-century England did equality become a basis for political demands by ordinary people. One day in the summer of 1646, a celebrity activist named John Lilburne appeared before the House of Lords and failed to kneel or even remove his hat. Summarily imprisoned by the nobles for contempt, Lilburne wrote a pamphlet asserting a “general Proposition”: “That every particular and individual man and woman that ever breathed” was “by nature, all equal and alike in power, dignity, authority, and majesty.”<br>Popularly known as “Freeborn John,” Lilburne had a talent for getting himself thrown in prison on behalf of various causes. Today, we might call him an “outrage entrepreneur.” But after his imprisonment, Lilburne’s Proposition became the defining cause of the radical Leveller movement, which subsequently dedicated itself to unlocking all of the revolutionary possibilities lurking in the word equal. The Levellers demanded universal male suffrage almost 300 years before modern Britain enacted it. And in an extraordinary 1649 appeal to Parliament, a group of Leveller women insisted that because they, too, were created “equal unto men,” they must also have the right to petition their representatives.<br>The Leveller movement mostly failed. But Lilburne’s Proposition lived on as a kind of early meme—one that eventually made its way into the Declaration of Independence. As it happens, Lilburne was also distantly related to Thomas...