The American Idea of Equality: The View from the Founding

"The American Idea of Equality: The View from the Founding." Review of Politics 38.3 (July 1976): 313-31.

Although the founders embraced the idea of human equality, Diamond argues in this essay from a 1976 issue of The Review of Politics, it was a limited, moderate, sober understanding of equality, the recovery of which would be a vital counterweight to today’s exaggerated, utopian, egalitarian doctrines.

Significant portions of this essay appear in The Declaration and the Constitution: Liberty, Democracy, and the Founders.

Online:
The Review of Politics
JSTOR
AEI Program on American Citizenship [pdf]