extraordinary amount of our political history. How are we to resolve the contradiction of immense inequalities in a society that claims to be founded on equality? There are two possibilities. We might say that it was all a fake, a set of slogans meant to replace a regime of aristocrats with a regime of wealth and privilege of a different sort, that inequality in our society is structural and an integral aspect of the whole of our political and social life. To say that, however, would be deeply subversive, because it would call for yet another revolution if we wanted to make good on our hopes for liberty and equality for all. It is not a popular idea among teachers, newspaper editors, college professors, successful politicians, indeed anyone who has the power to help form public consciousness. The alternative, which has been the one taken since the beginning of the nineteenth century, has been to put a new gloss on the notion of equality. Rather than equality of result, what has been meant is equality of opportunity. In this view of equality, life is a foot race. In the bad old days of the ancien régime, the aristocrats got to start at the finish line whereas all the rest of us had to start at the beginning, so the aristocrats won. In the new society, the race is fair: everyone is to begin at the starting line and everyone has an equal opportunity to finish first. Of course, some people are faster runners than others, and so some get the rewards and others don't. This is the view that the old society was characterized by artificial barriers to equality, whereas the new society allows a natural sorting process to decide who is to get the status, wealth, and power and who is not. Such a view does not threaten the status quo, but on the contrary supports it by telling those who are without power that their position is the inevitable outcome of their own innate deficiencies and that, therefore, nothing can be done about it. A remarkably explicit recent statement of this assertion is the one by Richard Herrnstein, a psychologist from Harvard, who is one of the most outspoken modern ideologues of natural inequality. He wrote, The privileged classes of the past were probably not much superior biologically to the downtrodden which is why revolution had a fair chance of success. By removing artificial barriers between classes society has encouraged the creation of biological barriers. When people can take their