Legal equality before the law requires negating actual individuality
Evidence
Only through self-imposed blindness is law able to let justice prevail. All are only seen as equal insofar as they are not seen at all; to do justice to the individual is only possible by negating individuality. It is not individuals who count as equal, but rather ‘the individual’. In this way, justice degenerates into tautology: an individual is what corresponds to the concept of the individual, which is in turn abstracted from individuals. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 793
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Adorno/Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment general claim about equivalence and rational domination; also resonates with Marx’s ‘abstract equality’ as commodity fetishism — worth cross-referencing the political-economy reading the reader is building toward. — connects to: Abstract legal recognition of rights fails to overturn women’s concrete economic inferiority — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 57; Formal legal equality obscures real inequality because equivalence as a legal norm ignores difference — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 786; Modern law’s abstract individual ideal enables its systematic social exclusions — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 404 (+10 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that universal equality is per se a form of domination — justice as tautology — is a dense, paradigm-flipping move central to the whole equivalence-critique the book traces.
Broader Connections
- Formal legal equality obscures real inequality because equivalence as a legal norm ignores difference
#corroborates(0.95) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 786 - European continent substituted formal legal equality for real equality of condition
#corroborates(0.92) - Law converts difference into sameness to enable formal equal treatment
#expands(0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 82 - Formal legal equality masks substantive inequality between rich and poor
#corroborates(0.90) - Modern law’s abstract individual ideal enables its systematic social exclusions
#corroborates(0.88) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 404 - The Rule of Law values predictability and uniformity over individual justice
#corroborates(0.80) — Frederick Schauer, Thinking Like a Lawyer, 61 - Legal rights require rigid binary categories that reject graded differences
#corroborates(0.80) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 755 - Freedom and equality form a fundamental, unresolved antinomy
#corroborates(0.75) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 2567 - True equality among people is impossible due to inescapable uniqueness
#corroborates(0.72) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 187