The demand for equality has given the cutting edge to nearly every important movement of social protest in American history. Together with individual liberty, equality is the central moral and ideological commitment of the American Republic, the prime reason given in the Declaration of Independence for the nation's right to independent existence. The author seeks the meanings attached to the idea of equality by the people who have influenced policy and shaped the discussion from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. He identifies certain conceptual categories, or levels of awareness: equality before the law, equality of political power, equality of religion and conscience, equality of opportunity, equality of sex, and equality of esteem. The emergence and interplay of these themes are then examines in the great historic controversies over two centuries: the American revolution itself, agrarian and commercial rivalries, economic advance and banking in the Jacksonian era, slavery and race, the rise of trusts and the decline of equality of opportunity, and the complex issues of religion, immigration, and assimilation. -- from Book Jacket.