Review of François Levrau, Noel Clycq (eds.), Equality. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan/ Springer Nature, 1 st Edition, 2021, 356 pp

Levrau and have produced a monumental editorial work, dedicated to the topic of equality in times of great social polarization. Equality understood as a multidimensional concept is fundamental for the vital aspects of society such as human rights, solidarity and even freedom and how these are to be conceived implemented and experienced by subjects; these are accomplishments which do not occur without an overarching idea of equality. This observation sheds some light on the long history of the human attempts to understand the theoretical, social, and practical aspects of equality. The present book explores this idea extensively, investigating the concept of equality from a multidisciplinary perspective, where a diverse range of theories about equality and welfare are combined with concrete data about equality in the real world. We emphasize the valuable distinction between equality and the welfare state, especially since, as Robert E. Goodin noticed, although the justification for the welfare state resides for the most part in the principles of social equality, ‘the welfare state is not really very egalitarian’, aiming to redistribute ‘only a certain strictly limited set of social resources; it is concerned with minimum standards, not thoroughgoing equalization; it is concerned to readjust final distributions, not basic holdings of productive assets, and so on’ (Goodin 1988, p. 51). The research into equality is structured in three parts. The first part is entitled ‘Theories & Histories’ and covers the conceptual aspects, with reference to political philosophy, history, and multicultural theory. The debates are