Equality

In this timely book William Ryan, author of Blaming the Victim, analyzes how and why the "vulnerable majority" of Americans, though "created equal," lives under the permanent and shaming threat of inequality. While noting that we formally exalt equality in such documents as the Declaration of Independence and even in everyday expressions about fair play, equal opportunity, and the common good, Ryan graphically shows how we nevertheless "play the game" in various spheres of public life by rules that divide people into winners and losers, superior and inferior rules that, in short, institutionalize inequality. A critique of this inhospitable system of beliefs, Equality also suggests that the foundations of true equality are not alien to the American tradition.