Kierkegaardian Religious Egalitarianism

Kierkegaardian Religious Egalitarianism names the paradoxical structure by which the leveling forces of modern mass society — its abstract, arithmetic homogenization of individuals — are reread not as pure alienation but as the very condition for a deeper, non-worldly equality. For Kierkegaard, the dissolution of aristocratic hierarchies of cultivation (Dannelse) by the democratic public does not simply flatten existence into inauthenticity; it strips away every socially-conferred distinction and thereby creates the formal occasion on which the individual may stand, alone and undifferentiated, before God. The egalitarianism in question is not horizontal (a social contract among equals) but vertical: it is the equality of each singular individual's absolute relation to the Absolute, a relation that renders all cultural, aesthetic, and civic markers of worth worthless. In this sense, the very abstractness of modernity — the reduction of persons to anonymous, interchangeable units — inadvertently mirrors the divine indifference to worldly rank.

This structure is theoretically significant because it stages a dialectical reversal: what appears as the nadir of the subject's condition (absorption into the anonymous mass, the erosion of particularity) becomes the condition of possibility for the highest form of individual self-constitution. The "abstract" leveling of democratic public life performs a kind of negative labor — clearing away imaginary identifications and symbolic distinctions — that leaves the individual with nothing but its sheer singularity before the Infinite. This anticipates, on the source's account, both Heidegger's analysis of das Man and Lacan's ambivalent treatment of modernity: in each case, alienation into the anonymous universal is not simply to be overcome but is the structural site from which a different relation to truth (or to the Real) must be negotiated.

This concept appears in samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive (p.70), positioned within a genealogy of modern public discourse that runs from Hegel through Kierkegaard toward Heidegger and Lacan. Its immediate polemical target is Heiberg's aristocratic Dannelse-culture, against which Kierkegaard's religious egalitarianism is offered as a structural alternative. The concept is thus both an extension and a critical specification of the cross-referenced canonicals: it takes up the notion of the Abstract (the leveling arithmetic of mass society, the erasure of particularity) and revalues it as the dialectical threshold for a genuine encounter with the Infinite — not the "bad infinite" of endless democratic accumulation, but the self-limiting absolute of the individual's singular relationship to God. It likewise presupposes a specific theory of Alienation: rather than diagnosing alienation as a loss to be overcome by recovery of social fullness, Kierkegaard treats the subject's estrangement from worldly distinctions as structurally productive, echoing the Lacanian insight that alienation is the condition of possibility for a certain kind of subjectivity.

The concept also articulates a distinctive moment within Dialectics: the leveling movement is not simply negated but sublated into a higher register — religious self-formation — in a move that McCormick's source positions as anticipating Lacan's own ambivalence toward modernity. Crucially, this religious egalitarianism turns on a notion of Universality that is not abstract-horizontal (shared citizenship) but achieved through radical Leveling: only when every positive marker of the Subject's social identity is stripped away does the truly universal — each person's equality before the Absolute — become legible. In this way, the concept lives at the intersection of multiple canonical nodes, functioning as a historically-specific figure for the dialectical revaluation of alienated modernity.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.70)

the person who has gained himself religiously is only what all can be … a sort of divine egalitarianism in which existing notions of Dannelse are worthless and in which only the simple integrity of the individual before God … has any worth.

The phrase "only what all can be" is theoretically loaded because it formalizes the paradox at the heart of the concept: the religious subject achieves its highest singularity precisely by becoming what is universally available — aligning with the structure of abstract universality while inverting its usual valence. The explicit devaluation of "Dannelse" (cultivated formation) further marks the break with any imaginary or symbolic register of worth, insisting that only the "simple integrity of the individual before God" — a relation to the Absolute that bypasses all social mediation — carries meaning.