Pierre Leroux On Equality Research

Pierre Leroux is a French utopian socialist thinker in the nineteenth century. In his youth, he read lots of writings by various enlightenment thinkers and the formation of his equality thought was greatly inspired by Rousseau. Later his equality thought was influenced by the socialist doctrine of Saint-Simon. Not before long, Leroux left Saint-Simon school and started to focus on developing his equality thought.In On Equality, Pierre Leroux states that human life is a combination of perception, emotion and cognition, and at the political level, these three are corresponding to freedom, fraternity and equality. He highlights the importance, fundamentality and prerequisity of equality. Equality is the basis for all legislation and prerequisite for all political power. Actually, he understands human equality as absolute equality and general equality, thus he thinks equality is just like human being, is also the masterpiece of God. In his preface to the book, he highly praises Rousseau because according to Rousseau's understanding of equality, God's position is over human being, and Rousseau also encourages people to pursue equality. Moreover, Leroux even put more emphasis on the pursuit of equality, and he advocates that other new theories should be developed to prove equality in this unequal world, so that God's position could be protected.Leroux analyses many unequalities in society and meanwhile he gives detailed statements of the real value of equality, pointing out the direction for followers to further develop equality thoughts. Although Leroux's equality thought does not fit into the social situation in his time and thus has never been put into practice, it has greatly influenced the development of subsequent scientific Marxist socialism. This essay studies and sorts out how Leroux's equality thought comes into being and how it finally develops into a complete set of theories.