The End of Equality.

Mickey Kaus, an editor of The New Republic with a basket of other credits in political journalism, is one of our better gadflies, nipping American liberals into intellectual uneasiness, if not serious thought. His The End of Equality, a mistitled book, has already created some stirring and shuffling and may jog liberalism in the direction of a better understanding of equality. And that makes it a gift, by any reckoning, to democratic life.

For some time now, as Kaus observes, liberalism has been inclined to point to disparities of income as crucial evidence of inequality. According to Kaus, this "money liberalism," preoccupied with redistributing income, is tilting at windmills, especially under contemporary conditions: the well-to-do evade or adapt to taxes;job training only creates new orders of rank; protectionism exacts too high a price in economic well-being for society as a whole. In any case, economic equality is at odds with capitalism which, Kaus maintains, is essential to adequate economic growth. To that extent, The End orEquality lives up to its title, but that is only the beginning of a more interesting story.

After all, liberalism's ventures into redistribution have been modest, to say the least. American liberals have held only that incomes should be more equal, contending that beyond a certain point, unequal income is incompatible with equality, and Kaus does not disagree. He points out, however, that while this argument implicitly concedes that money is not the sole standard of equality, lacking any other rule, liberalism tends to fall back on income as the measure. Far from proclaiming the end of equality, Kaus is concerned to offer a philosophy better able to defend equality against its all-too-potent enemies.

For Kaus, equality is a conviction of equal worth, a matter of psychology affected by all of civic life, a sense of belonging to a society of equals that he regards as very much imperiled. He denies, however, that increasing inequality of income is the cause of our growing social inequality. Economic differences, he argues, were just as great in the 1950s and early 1960s, years that "weren't bad... for social equality." This claim is jarring, since it slides over the inequalities of race and gender that characterized those years, but Kaus's broader argument is still valid: in recent decades, common institutions and public spaces have been decaying, and classes live in greater isolation. Our lives are less democratic, and that fact makes wealth a more important ordering principle in civic life. Accepting unequal wealth, Kaus calls for heroic measures to rebuild the foundations of a culture of equality.

His program is necessarily ambitious. Kaus indicates the urgent need to reduce the power of money in politics; he supports compulsory National Service, including a return to conscription; he advocates a system of national health care (partly on the unlikely hope that people will mingle across class and ethnic lines in doctors' waiting rooms); he supports communal day care, noting that it is easier to integrate children than adolescents or adults. He has kind words for institutions-like libraries, museums, or the Metro in Washington, D.C.--that provide "in-kind, universal" service to citizens, the "stuff of social equality," but he wants to make such services more efficient, chiefly by limiting public service unions. He celebrates democratic space, and he descries the developments, from suburbanization to narrowcasting, that have helped to shrink the public dimension of life.

At bottom, though, work is the cornerstone of Kaus's civic vision. Any hope for vitalizing civic equality presumes a solution to the problem of the underclass, a major contributor to the fear of public spaces, and especially, of cities and public schools. Recognizing all the intractabilities, Kaus would begin by substituting work for welfare, offering WPA-like jobs at government-supplemented wages, terminating all other forms of welfare beyond austere, in-kind maintenance. Better than condescending "compassion," Kaus argues, his design respects the dignity of citizens and their right to contribute to the common life.

Almost all of these proposals merit support, without respect to Kaus' s more utopian conceits, although these are surely troubling. He allows himself the "frankly speculative" hope that---once the underclass is attended to--Americans might choose to live closer to people of different classes, races, and ethnicities (at least, if upper-income Americans are offered lower taxes in exchange for abandoning restrictive zoning). This sounds like cloud-cuckoo land, since it discounts the noneconomic appeals of class distinction and cultural rank. Still, Kaus thinks it at least possible that Americans can be led to value equality for its own sake, if the creed of equality can acquire "the sort of primacy to which religions have aspired." Kaus, in other words, envisions a kind of civil religion rather like Comte's "religion of solidarity." That prospect is scary as well as implausible, since civil religions so characteristically acknowledge no obligation beyond the city.

Nor can civil religion really answer the question, "Why should we regard people as equal?" Inequality, as Kaus knows, is pervasive: in addition to their differences in beauty, intellect, and craft, human beings are not equal in moral virtue, for the most determined egalitarian will probably concede that Mother Teresa outranks Ted Bundy in that respect. Kaus notes that equality is a "spiritual" idea, at least in part, but he never explores that dimension and-- as one still can in American political practice-he appears to take it for granted. But by neglecting equality's religious underpinning, Kaus loses the breadth and the depth to be found in America's less secular faiths.

Kaus observes, for example, that there is a minimum of wealth necessary to meet human needs, but he never considers the possibility that there is an equally natural maximum, a point beyond which wealth might be a hindrance to the good life. "Needs," in Kaus's view, appear to refer to the body, and his usage points to the classical liberal notion of human beings as bodies who can never have too much, short of victory in their war with nature. That doctrine is the sand at the foundations of Kaus's city--the yearning for mastery is no friend to equality--and those who share his hope will be well-advised to seek help from the City that endures.

WILSON CAREY McWILLIAMS teaches political science at Rutgers University.