national levels) and also by a decreasing power of nonstate social institutions such as the church and the family. But why did this happen? In part, of course, the loss of local liberties and the transference of power to the new dynastic rulers and their bureaucracies was the consequence of a drive for power for its own sake on the part of the ruling groups in the rising nation states (24). But these rulers were often able to obtain widespread public support for their increasing centralization of power because this trend also accorded with the value aspirations of their subjects. Peasants felt better able to secure justice in the King's courts than in those dominated by the local nobility, with whom they were often in dispute. Individuals sought to escape the oppression of hierarchical churches and rigid family structures in the greater equality provided by the status of citizens of a wider realm. In large measure the growth of the modern nation state represents a deliberate sacrifice of the value of freedom for that of equality. But put another way, people could be said to have perceived the opposition between group freedom (local autonomy) and individual, personal freedom and given priority to the latter. Equality in this context contributed to freedom. What has historically been true in the Western world generally has also been true of the United States specifically, especially perhaps in recent decades. Originally it was the more egalitarian Jeffersonians who stood for “states' rights” against the more elitist Federalists who stood for a strong national government. But the extension of federal power over state and local governments and traditional social institutions since the Civil War has largely been under the banner of equality. First of all came the freeing of the slaves by the Lincoln administration and the radical Republicans during reconstruction, but by the time of Woodrow Wilson in the early twentieth century it was the party of Jefferson that was pushing equality, raising minimum wages and protecting racial minorities and disadvantaged groups such as women, children and the elderly. What happened in politics has happened in economics as well. The self-governing work place where rough equality among owners and workmen often prevailed has been replaced by the assembly line; the small farmer or merchant as economic unit of production has given way to oligopolistic and even monopolistic firms; and economic power has become more and more centralized. Again the question arises, why? Once again the answer is that, in addition to the drive for wealth and economic power on the part of the businessmen, workers and consumers alike were eventually convinced that the new economic system was producing affluence — in part precisely because of its concentration — and affluence was interpreted as meaning greater equality of consumption than had existed previously. The result was that economic freedom like political freedom was to be sacrificed on the altar of equality. An important qualification must be made at this juncture in the argument. We do not, of course, really know very much about the extent to which people value equality, much less how much they may have valued it at specific periods in the past. But such evidence as we have would lead us to believe that it has been a driving force in Western — especially American — society for several hundred years, and the desire for equality seems to be spreading throughout the world. We know perhaps even less about how much people value freedom, since as we have seen it is an even more complex concept. But historical experience seems to strongly suggest certain tentative conclusions. In the political realm most people seem to prefer “freedom from" to “freedom to" — that is, they are less concerned about how much direct input they can have into governmental decision making (witness increasingly low voter turnouts in American national elections) than how the output of government
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