ALL IN THE GENES? Our society was born, at least politically, in revolutions of the seventeenth century in Britain and the eighteenth century in France and America. Those revolutions swept out an old order characterized by aristocratic privilege and a relative fixity of persons in the society. The bourgeois revolutions in England, France, and America claimed that this old society and its ideology were illegitimate, and the ideologues of those revolutions produced and legitimized an ideology of liberty and equality. Diderot and the Encyclopedists and Tom Paine were the theorists of a society of "liberté, ésgalité, fraternité," of all men created equal. The writers of the Declaration of Independence asserted that political truths were "self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (by which, of course, they meant the pursuit of money). They meant literally all men, because women were not given the right to vote in the United States until 1920; Canada enfranchised women a little sooner, in 1918but not in provincial elections in Quebec until 1940. And of course they didn't mean all men, because slavery continued in the French dominions and in the Caribbean until the middle of the nineteenth century. Blacks were defined by the United States Constitution as only three-fifths of a person, and for most of the history of English parliamentary democracy, a man had to have money to vote. To make a revolution, you need slogans that appeal to the great mass of people, and you could hardly get people to shed blood under a banner that read "Equality for some. " So the ideology and the slogans outstrip the reality. For if we look at the society that has been created by those revolutions, we see a great deal of inequality of wealth and power among individuals, between sexes, between races, between nations. Yet we have heard over and over again in school and had it drummed into us by every organ of communication that we live in a society of free equals. The contradiction between the claimed equality of our society and the observation that great inequalities exist has been, for North Americans at least, the major social agony of the last 200 years. It has motivated an