The passion of equality and the challenge of difference: from the French path to Amerindian multinaturalism

Abstract

This article, written in dialogue with and as a tribute to Vinicius de Figueiredo’s A paixão da igualdade <The passion of equality>, reconstructs the French path as a laboratory in which equality is transformed from a moral passion into custom and law through the decline of privilege. In contrast with England, France stages the abstraction of the rule as generality; this framework is then complemented with the Brazilian case, where the egalitarian lexicon operates upon competing regimes of historicity. The material base (Prado Jr., Furtado) and the forms of sociability (Candido, Schwarz), articulated with the thesis of the bourgeois revolution in Brazil (Fernandes), help explain why equality spreads as a language of legitimacy but lags in becoming a generalized practice. The article ultimately proposes an anthropological shift: from historical-social explanation toward a grammar of conceptual translation inspired by the ontological turn (Holbraad and Pedersen) and multinaturalism (Viveiros de Castro). It concludes by defending a regime of ontological translation, in which equality is affirmed as a procedure of composition among worlds, in a cosmopolitical key that stands in contrast to the cosmopolitan standpoint.