Rising Together to the Ranks of Lords: Innate Equality and the Pre-Qin Vision of Self-Cultivation, Compared with Western Freedom and Equality
Starting from a brief episode in the Analects, in which the noble Wenzi of Wei promotes his own household steward, Zhuan, to stand alongside him among the lords, this essay reads that small event against the great declarations of freedom and equality since the Renaissance: the West places its ideal at the starting line, while the pre-Qin thinkers built the ideal into lived reality.
VI. The Western Path: From the "Discovery of Man" to the Declaration of "Equal Birth"
6.1 The Renaissance: The Discovery of Man and the Awakening of the Individual
The Renaissance was, first of all, not a political program but a turning of the gaze. In the Italian cities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, humanists took up the writings of Greece and Rome anew, marveling at the human capacity for language, judgment, and creation. Petrarch sought, in his classical-style letters, a self capable of shaping itself; when Vasari wrote the lives of the artists, he portrayed painters, sculptors, and architects as individuals possessed of unique genius, no longer merely nameless craftsmen within a guild. Once the printing press spread, books, maps, and portraits let more people realize that a single human life could be recorded — and could also be given shape by that person himself.
Pico della Mirandola, in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, imagined that God had assigned no fixed seat to man in advance, and that man could shape himself into a form approaching the beast or approaching the divine. This was an extraordinarily inspiring vision: a person's worth would not be wholly determined by birth, bloodline, and established rank — a person's choices and gifts could take part in shaping himself. Renaissance portraiture's fascination with face and posture arose for the same reason: every face seemed to say "I am here," demanding that the world recognize an irreplaceable individual.
Yet this "discovery of man" occurred, in the first instance, only within a small circle of art, scholarship, and city life. Nobles, merchants, and the educated had the time to read and to travel, while peasants, women, enslaved people, and the inhabitants of colonies were rarely included in this self-aware narrative of the subject. The Renaissance opened up the possibility of what a person could be, but it did not immediately provide the institutions that would let everyone make use of that possibility. It handed the spark of dignity to the modern age, and how to keep that spark from illuminating only the few became the difficulty of the centuries that followed.
The humanism of the Italian cities also carried a sense of "civic life." Statesmen and secretaries in Florence and Venice believed that the study of rhetoric, history, and law could enable people to take part in shared affairs; Machiavelli, later, in his Discourses on Livy, attributed the vitality of the republic to the action and vigilance of its citizens. Yet the cultivation of civic virtue requires long training, and the gap between rich and poor within the cities, along with outward expansion, kept undermining this ideal. The Renaissance called man the author of his own destiny, but it had not yet taught everyone how to co-author a political work together.
6.2 The Reformation: The Theological Equality of "Every Believer a Priest"
The Reformation of the sixteenth century pushed man's self-awareness into the realm of faith. Martin Luther opposed the Church's monopoly on salvation through indulgences and clerical office, arguing that believers could stand directly before God through faith alone; in his open letter To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, he argued that all the baptized are equal in spiritual rank — a position later generally summarized as "the priesthood of all believers." The equality here does not mean that everyone holds the same office, but that everyone can read scripture, pray, and answer for his own soul.
Translating the Bible into German, English, and other vernacular languages brought about a new community of readers. Ordinary people no longer had to depend entirely on the interpretations of Latin-trained theologians in order to hear scripture and form their own judgment. The church discipline that Calvin established in Geneva likewise linked the life of faith to the public affairs of the city. The Reformation thus weakened a single central authority and cultivated the habits of individual conscience and communal self-governance, supplying spiritual resources for later discussions of rights, contract, and public participation.
But theological equality was likewise no guarantee of social equality in fact. Luther did not advocate abolishing monarchs and magistrates in secular politics, and the wars of religion showed instead that differing convictions, without the labor of tolerance and negotiation, would turn into mutual persecution. The Reformation shattered the old intermediaries, but it did not automatically teach new believers how to live together. It granted the individual the dignity of answering directly to God, while also placing the burden of interpretation, organization, and discipline on shoulders not yet prepared to bear it.
A deeper change was that conscience began to be regarded as a form of judgment that no external authority could fully exercise on one's behalf. Since a person could now read scripture for himself, he had to learn to discern the text, govern his passions, and answer for the consequences of his interpretation; since a church was no longer governed by a single center, it had to invent councils, pastoral care, and methods of mutual oversight. The Reformation left behind an individual subject — and also left behind the risk of fragmentation. The higher the demand for equality in faith, the more it needed the accompanying support of tolerance and self-discipline.
6.3 The Enlightenment: The State of Nature, the Social Contract, and Natural Rights
The Enlightenment thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries translated the individual of the Renaissance and the conscience of the Reformation into political philosophy. Hobbes, in Leviathan, used the "state of nature" as a thought experiment: in the absence of a common authority, people exist in a dangerous condition of mutual suspicion and strife, and so hand power over to a sovereign through a covenant. Hobbes did not romantically believe that human nature is naturally good, yet he did acknowledge that every person has a right to self-preservation — and it is precisely on this point that sovereignty must be shown to be legitimate.
Locke, in his Two Treatises of Government, portrayed the state of nature as a state of "perfect freedom and equality," in which everyone possesses rights to life, liberty, and property; the duty of government is to protect these rights, and if government instead violates them, the people have grounds to resist. Locke's language shifted political legitimacy from the bloodline of the king to the consent of the governed, and later Anglo-American constitutional design drew heavily on this line of thought. Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws, discussed the separation of powers, seeking to prevent the concentration of power through the mutual restraint of institutions; he did not assume that rulers would automatically be wise, but used structure to compensate for human deficiency.
Rousseau pursued the origin of inequality along a different path. His Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men distinguishes natural difference from difference manufactured by society, pointing out how property, comparison, and dependence can harden a merely accidental advantage into a relationship of domination. The famous opening line of The Social Contract — "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" — is not a call to return to the forest, but a search for a political union in which each person obeys a common will that he himself has helped to establish. Kant, in his essay An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment$2, calls on people to "dare to use your own understanding," treating maturity as the capacity to escape a state of tutelage.
Together, these strands of thought form the grammar of modern natural rights: a person is already a bearer of rights before entering society; the power of the state derives from a contract rather than divine grant; the law should treat all people alike; and the individual should have freedom of thought, belief, and expression. These were, without question, major corrections to arbitrary rule and privilege. And yet the "natural man" of the thought experiment is a highly abstract model, while the actual person always carries family, property, education, gender, religion, and historical trauma. Transplanting an abstract subject directly into a complex society demands an extremely high level of institutional design and public virtue; Enlightenment argument often compressed this difficult intervening stretch of road into far too short a span.
The thinkers of the Enlightenment also knew that reason does not descend automatically. Public opinion can form only through literacy, publication, and sustained discussion; a contract can be sustained only if people trust in promises and are willing to accept temporary setbacks. Yet once "natural rights" were written as a set of sentences that anyone could immediately claim, this long process of preparation was easily obscured. Abstract equality is an entrance, not a diploma; it requires education and institutions to keep training strangers into citizens capable of trusting one another.
6.4 The Age of Declarations: The Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man
In 1776, the American Declaration of Independence declared, in solemn tones: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The power of this text lies in raising resistance to colonial rule from a local dispute to a universal principle: the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed, and whenever government becomes destructive of the people's fundamental rights, the people may alter or abolish it.
In 1789, Article 1 of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen proclaims: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility." Article 2 lists the rights of liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. The French declaration was not aimed at any single king alone — it placed the hierarchical privileges of the old order beneath a universal law. Its concept of "citizen" demanded that public power apply the same standard to everyone, and it supplied the legitimacy for the later abolition of hereditary privilege and the establishment of written constitutions.
The very form of the declaration transformed politics. It no longer began from the grace of some monarch or the ancient charter of some particular group — it took "man" as the subject of the sentence and "rights" as an irrevocable predicate. The oppressed could hold these few lines up to interrogate their government; colonies could use them to interrogate an empire; and later, women, workers, and minority groups could likewise borrow this universal grammar to expand their own claims. The declaration therefore carried a reproducible power: it let people in entirely different situations share a single vocabulary of legitimacy.
The American declaration would later need a constitution, a federal system, and courts to convert its principles into procedure; the French declaration had to seek a balance among a revolutionary assembly, local self-government, and the mobilization of armies. The text gave people a shared standard, but it could not substitute for the details of budgets, administration, and the judiciary. Who registers citizens, who levies taxes, who protects minorities, who bears the cost of war — all of these pull "equality" back down from the page into reality. The more universal a declaration, the vaster the range of accompanying work it demands.
6.5 Summarizing the Pattern: Placing the Ideal at the Starting Line, and Proclaiming It as an Axiom
From the awakened individual of the Renaissance, through the conscience of the Reformation, to the natural rights of the Enlightenment, the modern West gradually placed its ideal at the very starting point of politics. A person was first defined as a free, equal subject possessing rights, and only afterward entered the state, the market, and organized society. This ordering has an evident liberating effect: it does not allow a government to use "you were born low" as grounds for stripping away rights, nor does it allow a majority to treat a minority's dignity as a favor that can be revoked by vote.
But an axiom placed at the starting line cannot walk the rest of the road on a person's behalf. That everyone possesses rights does not explain how education is to be obtained, how differences in ability are to be handled, or how compromise is to be reached amid conflict — still less does it explain how a person, within an organization, moves from novice to someone capable of bearing responsibility. The declaration states the "ought" with great clarity, but leaves the gap in the "is" for institutions, custom, and individuals to fill in. The later success of the West has, more often than not, come from the long, gradual meshing together of multiple mechanisms — constitutions, courts, associations, markets, and education — rather than from the declaration itself automatically making good on its promise.
For this reason, "equal at birth" must be understood with a double vision. On one hand, it is a moral commitment deserving of respect, one that has given the oppressed a language of resistance; on the other hand, it merely raises the difficulty of shared life to its most conspicuous position: given that everyone is equal, how is difference to be arranged$3 Given that everyone is free, how is responsibility to be shared out$4 The declaration points to a direction, but it does not complete, on anyone's behalf, the labor of self-cultivation, learning, recommending the worthy, and mutual treatment. The history that follows unfolds precisely between this luminous promise and a heavy reality.