First Among Equals: Redeeming Equality as a Political Ideal

The 2026 Dorothy Garrett Martin Lecture in Values and Ethics

Teresa M. Bejan, Oriel College, University of Oxford

We say all people are equal as if the matter were settled. But what does equality actually mean, and what does it ask of us? Are we equal because we are fundamentally the same, or because our differences deserve the same respect? The answers are far from obvious, and the history of the idea is riddled with tensions we still live with.

In this year’s Martin Lecture, political theorist Teresa M. Bejan turns to a moment when equality stopped being an abstraction and became a demand. For centuries, philosophers and jurists had affirmed that all humans were fundamentally equal, a claim that sat comfortably alongside social hierarchy, political exclusion, and enslavement. That changed in seventeenth-century England, when ordinary men and women in movements like the Levellers, Diggers, and Quakers insisted that equality meant standing shoulder to shoulder with elites. The era’s most influential thinkers, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and the early feminist Mary Astell, were writing in response.

Drawing on her new book First Among Equals, Bejan argues that these early activists and philosophers still have something to teach us, and that recovering their vision can restore equality’s force as a political ideal today.

This event is free and open to the public.

About the Speaker

Teresa M. Bejan is Professor of Political Theory and Fellow of Oriel College at the University of Oxford. Her research explores questions of free speech, civility, tolerance, and equality through historical and contemporary lenses, with work spanning from ancient Athens to modern political thought.

About the Martin Lecture

First established at DePauw University in 2014, the Dorothy Garrett Martin Lecture in Values and Ethics is hosted annually by the Prindle Institute with generous support from the Delta Gamma Foundation. The lectureship creates a distinctively public venue on campus for open discussion of difficult, and sometimes disagreeable, ethical questions. Past lecturers have included scholars, journalists, activists, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs.