The Equality of Flesh: Materialism and Human Commonality in Early Modern Culture

By Brent Dawson

The Equality of Flesh traces a new genealogy of equality before its formalization under liberalism. While modern ideas of equality are defined through an inner human nature, Brent Dawson argues that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conceptualized equality as an ambivalent and profoundly bodily condition. Everyone was made from the same lowly matter and, as a result, shared the same set of vulnerabilities, needs, and passions. Responding to the political upheavals of colonialism and the intellectual turmoil of new natural philosophies, leading figures of the English Renaissance, including Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, anxiously imagined that bodily commonality might undermine differences of religion, race, and class.

As the period progressed, later authors developed the revolutionary possibilities of bodily equality even as new ideas of fixed racial inequality emerged. Some—like the utopian radical Gerrard Winstanley and the republican poet John Milton—challenged political absolutism through the idea of humans as base, embodied creatures. Others—like the heterodox philosopher Margaret Cavendish, the French theologian Isaac La Peyrère, and the libertine Cyrano de Bergerac—offered limited yet important interrogations of racial paradigms. This moment, Dawson shows, would pass, as bodily equality was marginalized in the liberal theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. In its place, during the Enlightenment pseudoscientific racism would come to anchor inequality in the body. Contending with the lasting implications of material equality for modernity, The Equality of Flesh shows how increasingly vehement notions of racial difference eclipsed a nascent sense of human commonality rooted in the basic stuff of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781501775673

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Cover: The Equality of Flesh by Brent Dawson

THE EQUALITY OF FLESH

MATERIALISM AND HUMAN COMMONALITY IN EARLY MODERN CULTURE

BRENT DAWSON

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

As for Power inherent in the People, how should one imagine such a thing? unlesse also he would imagine People to be juvenes aquilone creati, men like grashoppers and locusts bred of the winde, or like Cadmus his men sprung out of the earth.

—Dudley Digges, A review of the Observations (1643)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PARTONE:COMMONMATTER ANDCOLONIAL ENCOUNTERS

1. No Earthly Thing Is Sure

2. The Fire that Quickens Nilus’ Slime

PARTTWO: MATERIALEQUALITY IN REVOLUTIONARYPOLITICS AND GLOBALRELATIONS

3. Fellow Creatures

4. The Common and Impure Earth

PARTTHREE: HIGHEQUALITY ANDRACIAL PSEUDOSCIENCE

5. Infinite Several Kinds of Creatures

6. Of Mushroom Men and Rational Creatures

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It took me a long time to understand what this book was about. I doubt I would have reached that point if not for the generosity and support of many people who left their mark on it—and me—during the course of writing. I now recognize that part of what the book says is that people’s limitations make it possible for them to find common ground with others. I am fortunate to have experienced that, in ways I can only partially express here.

I owe a great deal to the wonderful teachers I have had over the years. Faculty at Washington University first stimulated my intellectual curiosity and passion for close reading. In particular, Wolfram Schmidgen guided me with impressive patience through writing a thesis, and Jami Ake was there at crucial moments with support. Many faculty at Emory University helped me find my voice as a scholar. Richard Rambuss gave me advice and support during graduate school and beyond, without which I would not be where I am. Patricia Cahill provided feedback with inspiring generosity and rigor. I also learned tremendously from friends at Emory. Conversations with Claire, Taylor, Luke, Megan, Mark, Rebecca, Lynn, and Kate, filled with an enthusiasm for art and music, politics and thought, remain with me still.

The students I taught at Clark Atlanta University, Davidson College, and the University of Oregon were in many cases the first to respond to ideas found in this book. For their forthright questions, stubborn resistance, and shared enthusiasm, I am grateful. I am especially fortunate to have worked with some outstanding graduate students at Oregon, including Gina Filo and Adrienne Bosworth, and conversations with them have made their way into these pages.

My institutional colleagues have taught me much about what it means to be a dedicated, compassionate teacher and scholar. At Davidson, I am grateful for the hospitality and mentorship of Zoran Kuzmanovich, Annie Merrill, and Randy Ingram. At Oregon, Mark Whalan has given me tireless advice about how to navigate the institutional life of an early career scholar, and great support at moments when I needed it. Lara Bovilsky has been an inexhaustible source of knowledge on just about everything, not least of which has been the publication process, and she made incisive comments that helped this book reach its final form. It has sustained me to work alongside, learn from, and talk with Paul Peppis, Ben Saunders, Forest Pyle, Stacy Alaimo, Mary Wood, Anne Laskaya, Tara Fickle, Brendan O’Kelly, and Faith Barter, among others.

Colleagues in early modern studies have been generous in sharing knowledge and providing opportunities to make connections and try out ideas. Officers of the International Spenser Society, including Sarah Van der Laan, Chris Barrett, Joe Moshenska, Debapriya Sarkar, Tiffany Jo Werth, and especially Ayesha Ramachandran, have been models of how to create a thoughtful and engaged community of scholars. I have been fortunate in the people I have met at conferences or panels, who have filled in knowledge, asked questions, or inspired with ideas that helped make this book possible, including Frances Dolan, Vin Nardizzi, Joseph Campana, Eric Song, Steve Mentz, Colleen Rosenfeld, Amanda Kellogg, and Cassie Miura.

The generous support of the Oregon Humanities Center provided much-needed time away to complete the La Peyrère chapter. As a research assistant, Rosa Smith worked with impressive dedication to help make that chapter accurate and informative.

Many people at Cornell University Press helped this book reach its final form. I am in tremendous debt to Mahinder Kingra, who recognized potential in its germinal state, read it with generosity, and provided steadfast guidance as editor. I also owe to him the suggestion for the Rubens on the book’s cover. Two readers left a shaping impact on the book through their questions, recognition of where it could grow, and encouragement to believe in its stakes. Anne Davidson copyedited the manuscript, patiently and thoroughly, and Susan Storch made the index possible. I would also like to thank others who helped see the book through production, including Michelle Witkowski, Kristen Ashley Gregg, and Jennifer Savran Kelly.

My first supporters were my parents, Debi and Jeff, who fed me, nurtured me, encouraged me to pursue dreams and challenge myself, and are still able to make me feel at home. My sister, Erin, inspires me with her hard work and accomplishments. I owe her for an early recognition of my intellectual abilities, when she gave me a nickname that meant confused. To my oldest friend, Tom, who is family now, I am grateful for many conversations through adolescence and after, and for being someone who still texts to talk about the fall of Rome. My three cats have filled with delight the hours of sitting to read and write. To my best friend and partner, Tze Yin, I owe more than can be said here. She is the one little onion who has made everything else worthwhile. Finally, Jonathan Goldberg was a better mentor than I could have asked for. Without his rigorous reading, care, and conversation, I would not be the writer I am. This book is dedicated to his memory.

Introduction

Shylock’s monologue from The Merchant of Venice has crystallized in the popular imagination as Shakespeare’s most famous assertion of common humanity. While some scholars may protest that to read the speech this way takes it out of the play’s context, this critic is on the people’s side. There is something undeniably compelling about Shylock’s speech, however clichéd it has become. But there is also something unfamiliar about its questions, despite their ubiquity:

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions—fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die, and if you wrong us shall we not revenge?¹

While Shylock no doubt appeals to some kind of common humanity, when one looks closely at the attributes he describes, they do not seem all that human. Many things, after all, can bleed. The qualities he imagines both Jews and Christians possess belong to the body—hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions—and few of them are unique to people. Surprisingly, then, Shylock’s assertion of common humanity is missing all the traditional attributes that make humans exceptional. His speech mentions no soul, reason, freedom, intellectual capacity, or moral judgment. For Shylock, what Christians and Jews share is not some unique feature of humanity, not a specific quality that makes humans human, but an attribute people possess no differently than any other creature: the simple fact of having a body.

From that fact, Shylock draws a set of shared conditions. Christians and Jews require the same food, they need shelter from the same winter and summer, and they can be killed by the same weapons and diseases. The repetition in these phrases insists on common conditions of vulnerability and need. Even Shylock’s final claim of similarity, with its reference to revenge, hovers somewhere between a moral demand for justice and a natural impulse to defend one’s life from threats to its preservation. Shylock argues throughout the speech that, because of their bodies, humans are exposed to nature and one another, capable of harming and being harmed, and dependent on other people and things for survival. These corporeal conditions—of being hurt, of starving, of getting ill and dying, of fighting back against mortal threats, and to a lesser extent, of being nourished and healed—are imaginable in Shylock’s argument as minimal ways in which people are alike, whatever their social position. It is as if Shylock, and the play to which he belongs, ask, What is common to people across divisions of race, religion, and class, through the mere fact of having a body? What, however undignified, do people share as a result of simply being alive?²

One senses all the more the strangeness of Shylock’s assertion of common humanity when comparing it to the idea of equality central to the liberal political tradition. Take, for example, that foundational document of liberalism, the US Declaration of Independence, which proposes that all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.³ We have come to understand the declaration’s definition of equal humanity in terms of abstract rights located in the exceptional qualities of human beings—an innate liberty, an ennobling pursuit of happiness—that seem far detached from the basic, creaturely aspects Shylock describes. A similar set of assumptions appears in another influential document of liberalism from less than a century after Shakespeare’s play—the description of equality in John Locke’s Two Treatises: There [is] nothing more evident, than that Creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without Subordination or Subjection.⁴ Locke appeals to the equality of humans through their shared membership in a single species. Unlike Shylock, Locke here argues that what makes humans like one other is what sets them apart from other animals.

The basic question this book asks is, How did the ideas of equality with which we are familiar today lose the embodied dimensions to which Shylock appeals? That is, how did equality come to be defined in terms of human exceptionalism and abstract rights? To answer that question, the book surveys a roughly hundred-year period, from the initial publication of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in 1590 to Locke’s Two Treatises in 1689. It uncovers a neglected intellectual archive of what I call low equality, based in common matter and shared bodily conditions. These theories of low equality complemented, challenged, and eventually were sidelined by modern ideas of high equality, which established political rights in attributes like reason and free will.

I argue that these theories arise in response to the swiftly changing social conditions of early modern England, both in terms of its class struggles and its increasing involvement in colonization and enslavement. These contexts will lead it to imagine new senses of group identity that are also embodied, articulated in terms of blood, stock, rank, and skin color, in ways that challenge emerging ideas of low equality. While both define humanity in sharply physical terms, one imagines a common embodiment, the other categorical difference. In contrast to Shylock’s claim that all people bleed alike, for example, Merchant’s Christian characters speak of blood as though there were different kinds in different people, contributing to what Dennis Austin Britton describes as the play’s tendency to racialize[] religious identity.⁵ Salerio remarks to Shylock about his recently converted daughter, There is more difference … between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish (3.1.32–34). At their most extreme, these ideas of embodied difference imagine marginalized others as mere bodies or loathsome matter. The Christian characters describe Shylock as flesh abstracted from soul. Their classification belongs to a form of racism that Lara Bovilsky has called "a theory of ontological differences between groups: Shylock is a stony adversary, an inhuman wretch, a creature that did bear the shape of man, and proof that souls of animals infuse themselves / Into the trunks of men" (4.1.4, 3.2.273, 4.1.132–133).⁶

Throughout this book, a conflict is waged over the meaning of humans as embodied creatures, whether it is a site of indelible difference or a minimal ground of commonality. Shylock, for instance, shares with the Venetians the view that marginalized political members possess an animallike condition. But in his account, this condition is common to all people; political power elevates some individuals above it, while confining others to it. The Venetians, he points out, have many a purchased slave, / Which like your asses and your dogs and mules / You use in abject and in slavish parts (4.1.90–92). This use of humans as no more than laboring bodies reduces them to a minimal state of natural needs and conditions that were always latently present: the enslaved are made to sweat … under burdens, their beds are not as soft as yours, and their palates are not seasoned with such viands (4.1.95–97). Where the Venetians claim that social difference is both natural and embodied, Shylock suggests that natural needs are common and that difference is an artifact of power.

While liberal ideas of equality often frame humans as exceptional beings above the rest of nature, seventeenth-century versions of low equality describe human commonality through shared matter. In doing so, they draw on the era’s protoscientific paradigms of nature, which suggest that, on the level of the body, there is no difference between one human and another, nor between humans and animals. Merchant’s obsession with the pound of flesh anticipates this leveling of humanity through reduction to bodily matter. Scholars have detailed the precise theological and racial connotations of the flesh that Shylock demands, whether through its recollection of bloodthirsty antisemitic stereotypes in insinuated threats of circumcision and castration, as James Shapiro has noted, or through its allusion to Pauline distinctions of Christian and Jew in its parodic miming of the circumcision of the heart, as Janet Adelman adds.⁷ All of these are important, but the play also seems to assign the pound an excess of meaning in addition to them, excising it from any specific referent. The fleshy mass Shylock demands is not hands, nor eyes, nor any of the organs Shylock says both Jews and Christians possess. Nor is it, as Portia’s cunning maneuver makes clear, muscle, bone, or any other specific portion of the interior body. Instead, it is defined only in terms of mass, a weight of carrion flesh (4.1.41). And on that quantitative level, there is no difference between a pound of flesh taken from one or another region of the body, nor indeed between the flesh of one person and another, nor even between the flesh of a person and an animal. To Salerio’s question, What’s that good for?, Shylock blithely responds, To bait fish withal (3.1.43–44). While there is no doubt something gruesome about Shylock’s reduction of humans into carrion stuff, it addresses the same set of concerns that appear in his monologue around the body as a common site of vulnerability, need, and mortality. In making this connection, he suggests that a sense of common humanity might extend from a recognition of common matter—that however different human lives and identities may be, they all in the end can be resolved to the same basic stuff.

The Equality of Flesh focuses on a group of early modern English authors—Spenser, Shakespeare, Cavendish, Milton, Hobbes, and Locke—who play a role in these articulations of low equality. These same authors, it suggests, also play a role in the circumscription of these ideas, limiting them through categories of race, social rank, and religion. The book places these canonical literary authors in conversation with less familiar figures—the Digger Gerrard Winstanley, the heterodox theologian Isaac La Peyrère, and the early critic of African enslavement Morgan Godwyn—as well as other early modern genres that theorize human commonality through nature, including works of political theory, materialist philosophy, and world history. The book charts the emergence around the end of the sixteenth century of tentative ideas of low equality in the political and colonial upheavals of the era. It argues that a major turning point is reached in the middle of the seventeenth century, when a political revolution in England, new philosophies of nature, and a growing awareness of global culture due to imperialism lead a small, radical group of authors to articulate the body as the ambivalent basis of forms of equality within and across societies. Finally, the book traces how these early modern theories of low equality are largely replaced in the Restoration and early Enlightenment by two seemingly opposed ideas: a liberal idea of equality from which the body has been removed and a pseudoscientific justification for racism anchored in the body. The book thus provides a new genealogy of liberalism, and of its constitutive contradiction between political equality and racial inequality. It details how, through the formation of liberalism, a still inchoate, more radical theory of equality was largely erased. By retrieving the place of the body in debates around equality, The Equality of Flesh provides new perspective on the way commonality was recognized—and repudiated—in mere physical stuff.

Stakes and Critical Positions

While equality is a value fundamental to modern democracies, its historical roots remain surprisingly obscure. As Jonathan Israel notes, Neither the philosophical nor the historical grounding of this idea … is at all obvious and this whole issue has been, to a quite remarkable extent, shrouded in neglect in the historical academic literature.⁸ One of this book’s aims is to address the relative absence of equality as a topic in studies of early modern literature and political theory.⁹ While there has been extensive exploration of the prehistory of other foundational modern political values—like liberty and republicanism—equality is treated as an anomaly, as though it sprang fully formed from the head of the Enlightenment.¹⁰ Going back to the foundational work of John Rogers in The Matter of Revolution, scholars have shown the importance of early modern discourses of materialism and vitalism to republican, radical, and other seventeenth-century political theories.¹¹ Building on that work, recent scholarship has demonstrated early modern political theory’s investment in ideas of common vulnerability, passion, and fleshiness.¹² Yet, even these studies of political materialism and embodiment, whose approaches closely inform this book’s own, do not focus on the link between this sense of common matter and the emerging concept of equality. This hesitation is understandable, given that equality was not yet a dominant political value, and nearly every version studied in this book is ambivalent in comparison to versions from the Enlightenment onward. However, just because Renaissance authors had mixed feelings toward equality, that does not mean they did not consider it at all. Quite the opposite: while articulations of equality remain implicit in authors like Spenser and Shakespeare, later authors like Milton, Winstanley, Bergerac, and La Peyrère directly frame equality or common humanity in terms of the body.

Another aim of this book is to provide a history of equality which shows this value has been riven from the beginning by conflicts over racism, colonization, and social rank. As Paul Gilroy notes in relation to human rights, an alternative, critical approach to the history of democratic values, one that would not fully equate their emergence with the spread of European imperialism, requires seeing … how a range of disputes over and around the idea of universal humanity … were connected to struggles over race, slavery, and imperial rule.¹³ While other scholars have connected the emergence of modern equality and race, they have tended to focus on the eighteenth century, with its anthropological and pseudobiological attempts to classify the global range of human cultures.¹⁴ By turning back to the early modern era, this book provides a genealogy leading up to the establishment of that pseudoscientific framework, examining a moment when there was a conflict over the meaning of humans as natural creatures.¹⁵ While the book’s narrative is mostly focused on elite authors in England who did not themselves advance radical political positions, it frames their ideas as responses to some of the historical upheavals that mark the beginning of global modernity in this era. These include the struggle for proletarian rights in England during the Civil War, the establishment of colonies and enslaved labor in the Americas, and changes in scientific paradigms of nature and history.

In pursuing that aim, the book draws on the ongoing work of scholars who have shown, as Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton put it, that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England cannot be understood without examining the development of ideologies of racial difference at the time.¹⁶ Scholarship on early modern race has challenged the long-standing assumption that racism could not exist before the emergence of a scientific paradigm in the eighteenth century. By looking back to discourses that predate scientific frameworks, scholars question, as Kim Hall puts it, the easy association of race with modern science, which ignores the fact that … race was then (as it is now) a social construct that is fundamentally more about power and culture than about biological difference.¹⁷ Racial thinking was formative across early modernity in ways that do not depend on Enlightenment paradigms, including in the period’s moralized and sexualized taxonomy of skin color, as Hall argues; in Protestant theologies of conversion and heritable sin, as Dennis Austin Britton and Kimberly Coles have shown; in embodied notions of Jewish and Muslim difference, as shown by Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Janet Adelman; in naturalized ideas of social rank and lineage, as Patricia Akhimie has demonstrated in relation to early modern conduct literature; and in geohumoral ideas inherited from the ancient world, according to Mary Floyd-Wilson.¹⁸ Jean Feerick helps to explain the transition from these early modern versions of race to later ones in terms of a breakdown in ideas of naturalized social hierarchy, where race is understood primarily in terms of aristocratic lineage and descent, toward ideas of race that characterize African and other peoples as biologically distinct groups.¹⁹ Feerick’s account has the benefit of showing how frequently early modern writers lodged their ideas of social inequality in beliefs about the fundamental inequality of nature.

Rather than focusing on the transition from premodern to modern racial paradigms, this book traces a conflict between egalitarian and inegalitarian implications of newly emerging paradigms of natural philosophy. By attending to the specificities of protoscientific discourses as they took shape in the cultural and intellectual milieu of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the book aims not to further entrench race in science and biological difference, but to highlight their historically contingent associations, building on important previous scholarship on race and early modern science.²⁰ It details a series of equivocal protoscientific ideas whose meanings were wrestled over, including notions of a basic animal form of life that was common to all humans, theories that humanity emerged from the earth like other living creatures, and speculation over human life existing on other planets. The book suggests that these protoscientific ideas were an important terrain in which equality and racism came into conflict in the period. By the end of the period, it argues, the liberal discourse of equality that was emerging largely came to abandon these embodied senses, and race was successful in fastening its meaning onto the idea of humans as natural creatures. In that sense, the book contributes to existing scholarship a sense of how racial paradigms came to diminish and sideline an inchoate sense of naturalized human commonality. It asks what can be learned from studying a nascent sense of embodied equality that was largely left aside.

Before addressing that question, I want to note two limitations of this book’s narrative and its scholarly conversations. First, its account of human equality focuses primarily on two categories—race and social rank—and does not grant as much attention to other social vectors in which equality was debated in the period, particularly gender. My approach is nevertheless indebted to the ongoing work of feminist and queer scholarship that has taken account of the period’s tentative ways of thinking about embodied sameness that is framed in terms of same-sex relations.²¹ My work builds on these approaches by showing how that sense of common embodiment informs some categories that have received less attention in these terms.

Second, the archive of this book is culturally English, with attention to some French influences, and for the most part, socially upper class. This book’s project would not be possible without the influence of scholars working on subaltern forms of early modern history, in terms of both proletarian movements within England and Black and indigenous voices in the early modern transatlantic.²² Some of that influence makes its way into the pages here, in discussions of Gerrard Winstanley’s proletarian ideas of equality, the ideas of indigenous historians like Garcilaso de la Vega who influenced La Peyrère, and the struggles between enslaved Africans and white enslavers described by Morgan Godwyn and Hans Sloane. But, in the main, my project is undoubtedly a history of equality espoused by people who already had most of the rights and recognitions of social membership. While its story is therefore limited, it is nevertheless far reaching, since the liberal version of high equality that emerges at the end of the book is one that has subsequently influenced political movements well beyond the space and time of early modernity. By providing a prehistory of equality just prior to this modern version, I mean to suggest that equality is more fluid and changeable, more open to contestation and reimagination outside this liberal paradigm, than has been previously understood, and that it could continue to be reconceived in our present moment.

Indeed, while this study holds that low equality mostly came to be abandoned over the course of the period, current political struggles around equality seem to be returning to some of the questions faced in the early modern era. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have suggested, At the end of modernity reappear the unresolved problems of its beginnings.²³ Equality seems to be undergoing a period of uncertainty in modern liberal societies, particularly around the importance of the body. Most directly, this uncertainty has come about through reactionary political movements in the United States and other nations that are more or less overtly hostile to equality as a value while appropriating its rhetoric. These movements exploit a superficial sense of equality that opposes any attention to exclusion in terms of embodied categories of race, sexuality, or gender and the manifestly unequal social conditions they create. Seen in light of the historical perspective offered by this book, such reactionary uses are revealed to be only the latest recycling of a racially exclusionary version of equality that dates back to the unresolved beginning of modernity.

Yet, it is not just antidemocratic forces that have given rise to the uncertainty around equality. Antiracist, decolonial, feminist, and queer movements have all made important claims that liberalism’s formal equality does not sufficiently offer protection against forms of prejudice, discrimination, and violence—including forms of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia—and that the rhetoric of formal equality can be complicit with such forms of harm.²⁴ These movements have rightfully pushed for the recognition of embodied differences—that is, lived experience under conditions of social differentiation—as meaningful in ways that the traditional idea of equality, with its insistence on the overriding fundamental sameness between humans, cannot quite seem to accommodate. Further pressure on the traditional idea of equality has come from animal-rights and environmental groups who have sought to extend rights beyond the category of the human and into the domains of animals and ecological systems. Such movements implicitly ask us to rethink who the subject of equality is if it is no longer necessarily human. These sorts of difficulties and shortcomings have led some progressives to the argument that equality is simply not a value not worth defending.²⁵ While the motivations behind such arguments are understandable, it is hard not to see them as suggesting that the current rhetoric of equality does not do enough to achieve the actual value of equality, rather than truly seeking to abandon it as a value.

Sharing the motivations of these progressive critiques, this book seeks to retrieve a more capacious and politically just sense of equality, one that would complement such critiques as a positive commitment against narrow, discriminatory, and racially structured classifications of the human. For models, it looks to scholars and theorists who have sought to redefine the value of common humanity while maintaining a critique of historically determined forms of dehumanization. Gilroy, for example, has argued for an unabashed humanism that must be coupled with a critique of racial hierarchy and the infrahuman life forms it creates.²⁶ Along similar lines, Judith Butler has proposed a non-individualist account of equality based on the importance of social bonds and interdependency.²⁷ When such projects look back to history, they have often, understandably, concentrated on the eighteenth century as the moment when racism, imperialism, and ideas of universal humanity emerge in entangled, dialectical relation. Both Srinivas Aravamudan and Susan Buck-Morss have shown how attention to the archives of race in the Enlightenment allow for the retrieval of alternative ideas of universality.²⁸

The value of returning to seventeenth-century England, whose nascent versions of equality often lack the political radicalism of later eras, is due to its focus on the body. The early modern era imagined versions of equality in which the body was still centrally important; these versions did not yet rely on a Cartesian division between body and soul or human and animal, which later was crucial to excluding people from equality based on race, gender, or colonial status. Early modern ideas of low equality are vastly different than our own in less appealing ways: they are often framed in heavily Christian terminology, they are more openly ethnocentric, and until a later part of the era they were largely uninterested in political rights. Nevertheless, as I briefly gesture toward in the closing pages, their concerns with what equality has to do with the body anticipate some of the ways antiracist, anticolonial, and other revolutionary political movements have taken up the language of equality while insisting on the importance of embodied needs denied by racial discrimination and economic oppression. By studying early modern ideas of equality, it becomes possible to recognize the tentative beginning of a way of thinking about equality outside liberalism that was developed more forcefully in later eras and whose unresolved questions remain with us today.

Definitions of Equality, High and Low

Like many terms central to modern culture, equality has accrued multiple, conflicting definitions. The sense I have in mind in this book is specific: I do not mean an economic sense of the equal distribution of goods—the kind whose historical fortunes Thomas Piketty has recently studied empirically in A Brief History of Equality. Nor do I mean the juridical sense of formal equality, defined as equal treatment before the law for (male, aristocratic, nonforeign) citizens, which has existed since at least Pericles’s funeral oration in Thucydides.²⁹ Rather, I have in mind something like what Jeremy Waldron calls basic equality, defined as a "deeper commitment to treating all human beings as equals—a commitment which seems to underlie our particular egalitarian aims."³⁰ If a society strives to grant people equal opportunities, protections, or outcomes, that goal must be based on some