Inequality in society - Essay Example

What he does not elaborate is on the manner of exploitation that he claims life offers. Pope, on his part, agrees that there exists equality in life and goes on to expound on those that an individual is born with. He asserts that the inequality that life offers depends on the scope of life that one is taking. The success of life, according to him, is relative and thus the relativity of the inequalities. What one considers success would not be success to the other thus the disparity. However, he agrees with the fact that the elements that aid one achieve that which he or she would consider success vary amongst individuals.

Francois-Marie Aroet deVoltaire in most of his works also points out though very briefly on the subject of equality. According to him, each individual deserves that which he or she gets. He groups individuals in categories, and these he argues that life has a way of grouping people then offering them equal opportunity to succeed or fail. His first argument is on class where he implies that an individual simply walks to school not knowing who he is likely to meet there. Once there a class of forty or so, students are attended to by similar teachers and what comes out of them at the end of the ten or so years of a course solely depend on how well they had made use of the equal opportunity life offered them at the beginning (Brumfitt 58).

In pre medieval society when life had not been stratified as it is today and there was no formal system of education, Voltaire argues that there still belonged pre medieval ways of life grouping people. These were either in the age groups or sets and he insists that even in the modern society, a person’s success is compared against that of his peers. Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality Jean Jacques Rousseau starts his discourse by putting a claim that there are two types of inequality which are natural or physical and ethical or political.

According to him, these are the inequalities in life that make one individual who was at a similar level with his peers all of a sudden appear to have jumped two or three stages in life. First, he begins by stating that the society is stratified. The stratification he asserts to are the social societal divisions where there are low income earners who belong to the lower class of the society. This is preceded by the middle class which is composed of average earners who are people who are not very rich in the society but they would not lack a basic need and some even afford some elements of luxury.

The low class is made up of individuals who struggle to make ends meet, their main priority revolve around the meeting of the three basic needs and most of these people live lives of abject want. At the top of this class societal stratification system are the rich and the wealthy who are referred to as belonging to the first class. Most members of this group are political leaders and business men who he later refers to as capitalist. On natural inequality, he begins by stating is found in the disparities of each man’s physical strength.

Some people are stronger than others and this would go a long way in determining the success level of the person, and in the long run determine which of the society’s class he finds himself. The strong can use force to take away belongings of the weak and this was evident in the pre medieval times when Alexander the great nearly conquered the whole world because of his military strength. In a