Turner, JackRodman, Emma2020-08-142020-08-142020-08-142020Rodman_washington_0250E_21431.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/1773/46163Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2020In American political thought, it is commonly supposed we make political communities more democratic by making them more equal. In this dissertation, I show that this common supposition is a mistake: efforts to enact equality in America in fact frequently undermine democratic inclusion. In three case studies, I show that some registers of equality produce and naturalize hierarchy, and have a sabotaging relationship to democratic participation and inclusion. Invocations and enactments of equality in the eras of the Founding, the antebellum early republic, and post-Reconstruction all reveal a surprising disjoint between equality and democratic inclusion. Using archival sources, published primary sources, and original datasets of text materials, I offer a complex and historically grounded new framework for understanding the tension between democratic inclusion and the American idea of equality. To understand this seeming paradox requires appreciating both the polyvocality of the concept and the relationship between the different forms of equality. While I show that some important conceptions of equality in American political thought are themselves inegalitarian at core, it is more often the case that conceptions of equality compromise one another. As different valences of equality have gained prevalence at different moments in American history, seeking equality in one area – political, economic, or social equality, for instance – has not necessarily supported equality in other areas. My reading of the historical record shows, in fact, that expanded equality in one area often comes at the expense of equality in other areas. Read together, the three cases lay out an alternative history of the concept of equality spanning from the late colonial era to the early 20th century. They show how different types of equality discourse emerged and operated as anti-democratic forces. Perhaps most troublingly, when read together the cases show how later iterations of equality discourse are just as prone to instantiating hierarchy and producing new forms of anti-democratic exclusion as the earlier iterations they sought to correct.application/pdfen-USCC BY-NC-NDAbolitionismAmerican political thoughtDeclaration of IndependenceDemocratic inclusionEqualityW. E. B. Du BoisPolitical sciencePolitical scienceThesis