What Price Equality? Some Historical Reflections
What Price Equality? Some Historical Reflections

Summary/Abstract: I should state at the outset that I am not concerned with the plain, literal admission fee into a community. In antiquity no less than today there are associations and even states and subdivisions of them membership of which is available for money, whether officially or by way of bribe. Take Rome. As the apostle Paul invokes the rights of a citizen, the military tribune in charge, a naturalized subject, remarks that he paid a huge sum for them.1 Assignment to a desirable class or order may depend on how much tax or other contributions you can afford.2 To some extent the slave allowed by his master to purchase freedom with the peculium belongs here.3 No doubt a modern re-examination of this area would be interesting. What I here understand by ‘price’, however, is a more indirect quid pro quo (admittedly, at times, bordering on the direct): the duties, restraints, losses of all sorts, consequent upon equality attained if not already upon equality sought.

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