Equaliberty

= concept by Etienne Balibar that indicates that equality and liberty are co-constitutive of each other

Description

Jason Read:

" equaliberty is specifically set against the philosophical cold war in which equality and liberty were seen as opposed political values: either one had equality and one did not have liberty (in the case of the Soviet Union) or one had liberty without equality (the US). Balibar develops this idea by showing how each of these ideas ended up contradicting themselves in practice. Equality without liberty negates itself, there are always “those more equal than others,” the party officials who are entitled to the goods and services denied to the regular members of society. The same could be said of liberty without equality; here we could take as our example the US, the myriad rights, to speech, to run for office, for a fair trial, all of which mean very different things, or little at all, given unequal access to resources and money. As much as one might search for an origin of equaliberty in the hallowed texts of political philosophy, Balibar’s favorite example is the overlap of “man” and “citizen” in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” it is a concept which is actually based on the history of struggles, a history which has demonstrated the impossibility of liberty without equality and vice versa.

That is the insurrectional side of this history, Balibar also argues that there is a constitutive side, in which various third terms are presented as mediations of this tense relationship, community (or fraternity) and property as ways of holding together equaliberty." (http://unemployednegativity.blogspot.com/2010/08/transindividuality-equaliberty-short.html)