A Colony in a Nation

by Chris Hayes

Since the American Revolution, we viewed punishment as a great equalizer; no special kinds of punishment was reserved for lords and for peasants. Thus the system of punishment that developed found equality in a race to the bottom: everyone got punished harshly as an expression of a core belief that no man stands above another. In Europe, as it democratized over time, the move was to push everyone into the category once reserved for the nobles: the sphere of humane treatment was widened until it included everyone. “Over the course of the last two centuries,” Whitman writes, “in both Germany and France, and indeed throughout the continent of Europe, the high-status punishments have slowly driven the low-status punishments out. . . . These countries are the scene of a leveling-up egalitarianism—an egalitarianism whose aim is to raise every member of society up in social status.”