Professor Jonathan Wolff: Social Equality: Then And Now

Professor Jonathan Wolff explores how ideas of relational equality have developed in the past 100 years.

It’s 100 years since the first Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures were held in 1925. To mark the centenary, the 2025/6 London Lecture Series focuses on the theme Philosophy in Retrospect and in Prospect. Distinguished philosophers have been invited to reflect on where their area of the discipline has got to over the last hundred years, and/or where it might go – or should go – over the next hundred.

All lectures include a post-lecture "in conversation" session with our Academic Director Edward Harcourt, followed by audience Q&A.

In recent decades, political philosophers have divided about how to conceive of a society of equals: whether to put the emphasis on distributional concerns or on the nature of relations between people. Contemporary ideas of relational equality revise ideas, especially from R.H. Tawney from almost 100 years ago. Professor Jonathan Wolff will explore how ideas of relational equality have developed from those times.

Jonathan Wolff (FBA) is the President of The Royal Institute of Philosophy and Emeritus Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. He has published many papers and books in political philosophy, focusing particularly on questions of inequality and the relation between political philosophy and public policy.