Final Report Summary - EGALITARIANISM (Egalitarianism: Forms, Processes, Comparisons)
The ERC Advanced Grant Egalitarianism Project officially started on June 1, 2014. The highly ambitious research scheme was broad ranging and global in design.
The concept of egalitarianism was born in Enlightenment Europe and America and epitomized in the ideals of the American and French Revolutions in particular, which guided aspects of the research enquiry that was both library and field research based.
The aim of the project was to go beyond western based understandings of egalitarianism. One often conceives it as a levelling force of anti-structure, of freedom and democratic liberation. It is then defined especially for situations grasped as socially and politically constraining, exclusionary and oppressive.
The project was concerned to relativize this egalitarian notion and understand it in the specificities of socio-cultural and historical situations, but to establish general cross-contextual understandings. Research in the project has demonstrated that egalitarianism has indeed installed itself as an idealist imagination a la Rousseau, while in a historical comparative frame it is hierarchy in its manifold contextually relative structural and institutional forms and practice that is at the root of human societies.
Egalitarianism is born in hierarchy and is a vital recurring energy in the redirection and restructuring of human societies. Aspects of this have been sharply revealed in current crises of state and society, crises often of an extremist variety that are widely seen to be threatening of democratic orders. Members of the research team have published widely on this contemporary feature of which the phenomena of Brexit and the populist manifestation of Trump in America are outstanding instances.
A general finding of the research concerns what has been labelled the egalitarian paradox whereby egalitarian ideologies and practices give rise to forms of hierarchy with exclusionary and oppressive effects. Researchers on the project have explored the paradox with reference to ethnic and religious conflict and movement of refugees into Europe, corporate processes of resource extraction and activist reaction to it, indigenous people’s claim for autonomy and political resistance movements in Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, Australia and Asia. The question of the state and its inegalitarian potential features here, with reference to wealth accumulation and distribution as well as the investigation of corporate influence. Of special concern has been the emergence of what the research group defines as the corporate state form from out of hitherto globally dominant nation state orders. This process was identified as a dynamic of often novel inegalitarian consequence and control of state machineries by corporate elites has been at the heart of much of the research and dissemination.
The project has succeeded in establishing a wide international network linking up a cross-disciplinary group of scholars on comparative processes of a truly global order.
The concept of egalitarianism was born in Enlightenment Europe and America and epitomized in the ideals of the American and French Revolutions in particular, which guided aspects of the research enquiry that was both library and field research based.
The aim of the project was to go beyond western based understandings of egalitarianism. One often conceives it as a levelling force of anti-structure, of freedom and democratic liberation. It is then defined especially for situations grasped as socially and politically constraining, exclusionary and oppressive.
The project was concerned to relativize this egalitarian notion and understand it in the specificities of socio-cultural and historical situations, but to establish general cross-contextual understandings. Research in the project has demonstrated that egalitarianism has indeed installed itself as an idealist imagination a la Rousseau, while in a historical comparative frame it is hierarchy in its manifold contextually relative structural and institutional forms and practice that is at the root of human societies.
Egalitarianism is born in hierarchy and is a vital recurring energy in the redirection and restructuring of human societies. Aspects of this have been sharply revealed in current crises of state and society, crises often of an extremist variety that are widely seen to be threatening of democratic orders. Members of the research team have published widely on this contemporary feature of which the phenomena of Brexit and the populist manifestation of Trump in America are outstanding instances.
A general finding of the research concerns what has been labelled the egalitarian paradox whereby egalitarian ideologies and practices give rise to forms of hierarchy with exclusionary and oppressive effects. Researchers on the project have explored the paradox with reference to ethnic and religious conflict and movement of refugees into Europe, corporate processes of resource extraction and activist reaction to it, indigenous people’s claim for autonomy and political resistance movements in Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, Australia and Asia. The question of the state and its inegalitarian potential features here, with reference to wealth accumulation and distribution as well as the investigation of corporate influence. Of special concern has been the emergence of what the research group defines as the corporate state form from out of hitherto globally dominant nation state orders. This process was identified as a dynamic of often novel inegalitarian consequence and control of state machineries by corporate elites has been at the heart of much of the research and dissemination.
The project has succeeded in establishing a wide international network linking up a cross-disciplinary group of scholars on comparative processes of a truly global order.