Equality
Glossary
A
- Annual Credit
- The system that has replaced money and wages: every adult citizen receives an equal yearly credit (Julian's is $4,000) drawn upon like a bank account but canceled and recalculated each year, preventing hoarding and guaranteeing every citizen the same economic footing.
- Related: Mr. Chapin, Economic Equality, Nationalization of Industry
B
- Boston Common
- The historic Boston public park where Julian and Dr. Leete walk in Chapter 25 and encounter the monument to nineteenth-century strikers, grounding the novel's futuristic Boston in a real, recognizable civic landscape.
- Related: The Strikers
D
- Doctor Leete
- Edith's father and Julian's principal guide to the workings of the twentieth-century republic. He supplies the book's long expository arguments on economic equality, the history of the Revolution, and rebuttals to nineteenth-century objections, often reading aloud from historical sources like Kenloe's Book of the Blind.
- Related: Julian West, Edith Leete, The Book of the Blind
E
- Economic Equality
- The book's central thesis and title concept: that formal political equality (the vote, equality before the law) is worthless without an equal claim to the economic product of society. Dr. Leete argues at length that this, not mere political democracy, is what the Revolution actually secured.
- Related: The Revolution, Annual Credit, Private Capitalism
- Edith Leete
- Julian's wife in the new century and Dr. Leete's daughter, who acts as an eager but sometimes bewildered questioner about the vanished nineteenth-century order. Her cross-examination of Julian in Chapter 1 opens the book's central inquiry into why the poor and rich alike tolerated inequality for so long.
- Related: Julian West, Doctor Leete
F
- Fashion Dethroned
- The subject of Chapter 8: the abolition of nineteenth-century fashion's tyranny over dress, replaced by a system in which citizens can order any costume, historical or invented, made instantly by machine — framed as a minor but telling instance of liberation from irrational social compulsion.
- Related: Edith Leete, Nationalization of Industry
H
- Honolulu
- The city where, in the world of the novel, a celebrated historical drama re-enacting the great Revolution is performed — a small detail signaling the story's transformed, globally integrated twentieth-century civilization.
- Related: What Started the Revolution
I
- Industrial Army
- A term, carried over from Bellamy's Looking Backward, for the organized national workforce into which all citizens are inducted, replacing private employment with collective, publicly administered labor as part of the Revolution's economic reorganization.
- Related: Nationalization of Industry, Economic Equality
J
- Julian West
- The narrator, a nineteenth-century Bostonian who fell into a mesmeric sleep in 1887 and awoke in the year 2000 (as told in Bellamy's earlier Looking Backward). In this sequel he continues his education in the new society, this time pressing Dr. Leete and Edith on the economic reasoning behind the Revolution rather than its machinery.
- Related: Doctor Leete, Edith Leete, The Revolution
K
- Kenloe
- The compiler, writing soon after the Revolution's triumph, of the Book of the Blind, who insisted on preserving the discredited arguments of preachers, capitalists, and philosophers against economic equality so that posterity would believe they had actually been made in earnest.
- Related: Book of the Blind, Doctor Leete
L
- Life the Basis of the Right of Property
- Dr. Leete's argument, made using Julian's own locked safe as a prop (Chapter 11), that society's paramount duty is to safeguard each citizen's right to life, and that this obligation extends to guaranteeing subsistence — making the individual's economic security, not accumulated private wealth, the true foundation of property rights.
- Related: Doctor Leete, Economic Equality, Annual Credit
M
- Malthusianism
- The population theory, associated with Thomas Malthus, holding that unchecked population growth outstrips food supply and that poverty functions as a natural check on numbers. The book devotes a section of the Book of the Blind to refuting it, arguing that poverty's brutalizing conditions promote reckless reproduction rather than restrain it.
- Related: Book of the Blind
- Marriage Contract (as economic transaction)
- Dr. Leete's characterization of nineteenth-century marriage as, beneath its sentimental trappings, a legal quid-pro-quo in which a man agreed to maintain a woman in exchange for her exclusive submission to him — a bargain the book presents as abolished once women no longer depended on men for subsistence.
- Related: The Woman Question, Triple Yoke
- Mr. Chapin
- The superintendent of the twentieth-century bank Julian visits in Chapter 4, who explains the annual credit system and the simplified national bookkeeping that has replaced private banking and money.
- Related: Annual Credit, Nationalization of Industry
N
- Nationalization of Industry
- The Revolution's core institutional change: the transfer of industrial and commercial administration from private capitalists to collective, democratic public control, extending popular government beyond politics into the economy itself.
- Related: Private Capitalism, Political Corruption Objection, The Revolution
O
- Overproduction
- The explanation nineteenth-century "soothsayers" (economists) offered the people for scarcity amid plenty — that there was too much of a good produced for it to be profitably sold — which the book treats as a self-serving mystification of the profit system's contradictions.
- Related: The Profit System, Parable of the Water Tank
P
- Political Corruption Objection
- A catalogued objection to nationalizing industry: that a government already corrupt (through bribery by capitalists seeking franchises and privileges) could not be trusted with additional economic power. Dr. Leete answers that nationalization would dry up precisely this source of corruption by removing the private franchises being bribed for.
- Related: Nationalization of Industry, Book of the Blind
- Poor Laws
- Nineteenth-century pauper-relief statutes that Dr. Leete cites as a dim, inadequate precedent for the state's duty to guarantee subsistence — provision so meager and stigmatizing that recipients often preferred death to accepting it.
- Related: Right of Property on Life, Doctor Leete
- Private Capitalism
- The nineteenth-century economic order the book indicts throughout: the ownership and control of industry by a small capitalist class whose sole object, in Julian's own retrospective account, was maximum private gain without regard to public welfare, producing vast inequality despite formal political democracy.
- Related: The Profit System, Economic Equality, The Revolution
R
- Republic of the Golden Rule
- Edith's name for the reorganized twentieth-century society she and Julian inhabit, invoking the Christian ethical principle as the animating ideal behind economic equality — a deliberate contrast to the nominally Christian but economically ruthless nineteenth century.
- Related: Economic Equality, The Pulpit Objection
S
- Storiot
- A future historian whose statistical account of the concentration of American wealth in the late nineteenth century Dr. Leete reads aloud in Chapter 34, corroborated by independent contemporary estimates that the richest 1.4% of the population held roughly 70% of the nation's wealth.
- Related: What Started the Revolution, The Revolution
T
- The Book of the Blind
- A historical compilation assembled by the revolutionary-era chronicler Kenloe, cataloguing by name the arguments — pulpit, aesthetic, and political — once made against economic equality, preserved so posterity would not forget how strenuously the old order was defended.
- Related: Kenloe, Doctor Leete, Pulpit Objection
- The Competitive System
- The nineteenth-century ideology holding that unrestrained economic struggle weeds out inferiority and rewards the fittest. The Book of the Blind's rebuttal calls it a fraudulent, unequal contest that rewarded ruthlessness rather than merit, contrasting it with a "true" competition under economic equality that rewards contribution to general welfare.
- Related: Book of the Blind, Private Capitalism
- The Parable of the Water Tank
- A biblical-style satirical allegory Dr. Leete reads aloud in Chapter 23, found among revolutionary-era pamphlets, in which capitalists sell the people back water they themselves carried at a loss, illustrating the absurd self-defeating logic of the profit system and the ideology of "overproduction" used to justify it.
- Related: The Profit System, Overproduction, Doctor Leete
- The Profit System
- Bellamy's term for capitalist production organized around private profit rather than social need. The book argues it is self-defeating ("economic suicide") because it systematically limits the buying power of the very workers who must consume what they produce, a claim dramatized in "The Parable of the Water Tank."
- Related: Private Capitalism, The Parable of the Water Tank, Overproduction
- The Pulpit Objection
- One of the historical arguments catalogued in the Book of the Blind: the nineteenth-century clergy's claim that social misery stemmed from innate human sin, and that no institutional change (such as economic equality) could improve society without first reforming individual souls.
- Related: Book of the Blind, Republic of the Golden Rule
- The Revolution
- The peaceful, evolutionary transition from private capitalism to economic equality that historians date from around 1873. Unlike a violent uprising, it is presented as the culmination of the growth of intelligence among the masses, brought to completion once popular demand for change became irresistible.
- Related: Economic Equality, Private Capitalism, The Strikers
- The Strikers (Boston Common Monument)
- A sculptural monument on Boston Common depicting nineteenth-century laboring men, which Julian is startled to encounter in Chapter 25. Where his contemporaries held strikers in contempt, the future honors them as forerunners of the Revolution whose sacrifices taught the public the wickedness of private capitalism.
- Related: The Revolution, Private Capitalism
- The Woman Movement
- The nineteenth-century women's rights campaign Julian recalls, which sought the vote and reforms to property and custody law but, in the book's retrospective judgment, failed to see that women's true subjection was economic rather than merely legal or political.
- Related: The Woman Question, Triple Yoke
- The Woman Question
- The book's extended argument (Chapter 20) that economic equality benefited women even more than men, since women under the old order bore a "triple yoke": subjection to the rich alongside men, personal subjection to individual men, and enforced conformity of thought and manner — all rooted in women's economic dependence.
- Related: Triple Yoke, Marriage Contract, Edith Leete
- Triple Yoke
- Dr. Leete's description of women's compounded nineteenth-century bondage: class subjection shared with men, personal/sexual subjection to an individual man, and an intellectual and moral yoke requiring conformity to please men — all dissolved, in his account, by women's economic independence after the Revolution.
- Related: The Woman Question, Marriage Contract
W
- What Started the Revolution
- Chapter 34's historical account, read to Julian from a book Edith fetches, tracing the Revolution's causes to the post-Civil War concentration of wealth, the corruption of legislatures by capitalist bribery, and the use of militia to suppress strikes — developments Julian lived through without recognizing as revolutionary.
- Related: Storiot, The Revolution, The Strikers