Yesterday I finished reading Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ excellent book Against War, and it seems appropriate that on Bastille Day I should gather together some thoughts about its resurrection of the ideal of fraternity, the continually neglected term of the famous trinity of values of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity. As Maldonado-Torres points out, liberty and equality are typically posed as mutually exclusive terms, and this incompatibility informs the deadlock of our two main political ideologies, the defenders of individual liberty (and therefore social inequality) against the defenders of social equality (and therefore individual unfreedom).[1] While people have been having it out vociferously about which value is more fundamental, fraternity has been forgotten, and along with it, liberty and equality. This is to say: liberty,…

+Read more