Billy Christmas Speaks on Liberal Equality and a State Simplification

Billy Christmas, Associate Professor at the John Chambers College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University, will give a talk with the title “Liberal Equality and a State Simplification”.  

The talk will take place on October 21, 2026, from 4-5:30pm in Commonwealth B (Squires Student Center). 

The talk is tailored to appeal to both faculty and students, with plenty of time for discussion and interaction with the guest speaker. The talk will be followed by a public reception.  

Here is an abstract of the talk: Formal legal equality; that is, the uniform application of law to all adult persons regardless of estate, rank, sex, religion, race, or personal ties to power, emerged in early modern Western Europe and matured by the early twentieth century. It is the normative basis of liberal society insofar as it institutionalises (negative) liberty within a framework of legal rights to all persons as such. This paper interprets liberal equality, following James C. Scott, as a kind of state simplification. Due to their epistemic limits, states must construct abstract, rationalised models of society and, where necessary, coercively reshape social reality to fit them. The model in which individuals are nothing more than named bearers of property rights (bearing tax liabilities) and of contractual obligations (requiring enforcement) is all the state needs to know about us where its chief concern is maximising long-term tax revenue. It is also the kind of benign neglect that that liberalism normatively aspires to. For states to be credibly committed to sustaining, and being constrained by, such an abstract institutional framework, intermediary organisations that assign differentiated identities must become fiscally and administratively redundant. The state needs sufficient coercive and administrative capacity to bypass them, and not piggyback on their, respective, peculiar epistemic lenses. The result is a paradox facing liberal non-ideal theory: a state capable of “leaving us alone” requires substantial coercive and administrative capacity.

If you are an individual with a disability and desire an accommodation, please contact ppe@nullvt.edu at least ten business days before the event.