Eighteenth-century French materialism grounded equality in biological species-unity

Evidence

One can observe the parallel evolution of modern democracy and of specific forms of metaphysical materialism and idealism. Equality is sought for by the French materialists of the eighteenth century in the reduction of man to a category of natural history, an individual of a biological species, distinguished not by social and historical qualifications but by natural gifts, and in any case, essentially equal to his kind. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1292

Categorization

• XREF: This is the seed of the modern distinction between formal-legal equality (species membership) and substantive equality (social position) that recurs in critiques of liberal citizenship.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1292