Unconditional Equals thus functions successfully as both scholarly monograph and memoir. At a time when polarization makes changes of opinion more and more costly to express in public, this feature alone makes the book remarkable. Much of the book is engaged with what intellectual historian Katrina Forrester, in her recent study of John Rawls, calls “the politics of political philosophy.” Throughout, Phillips takes particular care to highlight the many issues, big and small, on which she has changed her mind. (This goes especially for liberal democracies, as societies that formally acknowledge the equality of their members but often resist the substantive realization of social and material conditions between them.) Now, with Unconditional Equals, Phillips revises her earlier arguments by tracing the development of her thinking about equality over the course of her career. In her many books and articles since, Phillips has continued to remind her colleagues in political philosophy to mind the gap between our theories and the practices they can be used to justify, and she has emphasized just how far self-professed egalitarians still have to go in the realization of their ideals. Central to Phillips’s argument was a distinction between a politics of ideas, according to which individuals’ embodied differences-as opposed to their reasons and arguments-should play no role in democratic deliberation, and a politics of presence, according to which these differences do matter-and indeed, empirically, matter quite a lot-when it comes to who gets a seat at the table of political power and whether their voices count. Long an important figure in feminist theory and political philosophy, Phillips made her name in the 1990s with The Politics of Presence (1995), which argued in favor of quotas and other forms of “group representation” to combat the political marginalization of women and racial and ethnic minorities in modern democracies. Unconditional Equals confronts these problems head on. How is it, Phillips wonders, that arguments grounded in what philosophers call “basic equality” so often end up justifying the treatment of some humans as more equal than others? And after so much disillusionment-amidst staggering wealth inequality and enduring marginalization-what role can equality possibly still play in our visions of a more just world? Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” (never mind slaves and women) remains notoriously fuzzy. Despite its supposed clarity, the “self-evident” truth recorded in the U.S. In her unsettlingly brilliant new book, Unconditional Equals, British political theorist Anne Phillips cites Simone as evidence of the profound power and urgency of equality as a political ideal while also exploring the ways that discussions of equality, whether in politics or philosophy, can go wrong. After so much disillusionment, what role can equality possibly still play in our visions of a more just world?
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