“Equality is not a goal to be attained but a point of departure”

“Equality is not a goal to be attained but a point of departure” expresses a politics that treats equality as an operative premise rather than a distant reward. In the book’s account of emancipatory prescription, the axiom is not something to be approached cautiously from outside; it is adopted as the starting point from which action and its consequences unfold.

Meaning and Political Use

The expression is attributed to Jacques Rancière’s formulation of equality as “a point of departure, a supposition to be maintained in all circumstances.” Its force lies in the contrast between equality as a present assumption and equality as a future objective. The first makes equality a rule for judging and organizing action now; the second risks turning it into a promise whose realization can continually be deferred.

This is why the passage presents prescription as more than a statement of belief. To posit equality as an axiom is to demand its direct installation as a guiding principle of social action, rather than to treat it as an aspiration that must await favorable conditions. The claim changes the standard by which the present is assessed: existing inequalities do not become acceptable simply because a gradual process is said to be moving toward a more equal future.

Prescription and Political Time

The passage describes prescription as urgent and oriented to the here and now. Its temporality is circular and retroactive: political actors work toward the consequences of an axiom while treating that axiom as already realized. The commitment does not mean that equality has empirically been achieved. It means that action begins from equality as a supposition, and that the effects of acting from this premise are then developed and defended.

Hallward’s account, drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre, clarifies this sequence: first comes the decision, then the reconstruction of its reasons and circumstances in the light of what the commitment makes possible. Action is not merely the final step in a calculation that has already settled every question. The commitment opens a field of consequences, and reflection follows the act to identify the limits and possibilities it has disclosed.

Contrast with Gradualism and the Book’s Wider Argument

The expression marks an irreducible difference from a moderate liberal approach that seeks first to create conditions for future equality. In the passage, gradualism makes equality dependent on a later stage, weighing circumstances and compromises before acting; prescription instead rejects deferral and measures the present directly against the axiom. The disagreement concerns not just the preferred pace of reform but the starting point from which political judgment proceeds.

The book’s discussion of political economy offers a related methodological contrast without making equality and value the same problem. In its reading of Karl Marx through Kojin Karatani, the analysis resists reducing a form to a superficial cover for an underlying substance: commodity form itself is essential, and production and circulation remain in a parallax relation rather than collapsing into one privileged viewpoint. The equality axiom likewise cannot be reduced to a future outcome behind present action. In both discussions, the form or premise through which a relation is enacted matters; it is not simply a veil to be discarded on the way to a supposedly more substantial truth.

The expression therefore condenses a demand about political judgment and practice: equality must function as a present point of departure, with commitment to its consequences, rather than as a distant endpoint that excuses postponement.