Equality in singularity

Abstract

Starting with Andreas Reckwitz’s historical sociology of modernity as described in The Society of Singularities, we show how the transition from a culture of the bourgeois subject to a culture of the individual as a unique subject marks a transition from gradual to conditional equality among social actors. This shift manifests in practice as an equality within inequality, where everyone is subjected to the valorisation and devaluation of their own particularities by others. This equality within inequality signifies a radicalisation of social inequality driven by the expansion of the culture of the singular subject, whereby social actors can rely only on themselves – specifically, on their investment in their own particularities – to escape social emptiness. We then analyse the theoretical framework Reckwitz employs to explain this transition from gradual to conditional equality, a framework rooted in the spread of the cultures of the individual in modernity.