Political philosophy was deeply renovated in the last decades of the twentieth century; at the centre of this «reinassance» was the characterisation of equality as the «sovereign virtue», that is, the fundamental parameter by reference to which to pass normative judgment on social institutions and practices. The economic, political and cultural context of the rise of equality was the triumph of the Democratic and Social State, which entailed a deep remodeling of the relationships between individual, society and state (Section I). Equality was found to be a social, distributive, complex and contextual virtue, while discussions about the proper «measuring rod» of equality unfolded (Section II). The (not infrequent) paradox is that theoretical debates flourished at the same time that the social bases of egalitarianism started to crack, as western societies became more inegalitarian, as reflected in key socio-economic indicators (such as the GINI coefficient) (Section III). This «inegalitarian transformation» has left its mark on the structure of society, feeding massive existential inequalities, damaging economic welfare and undermining social stability, by means of contributing to the reemergence of social and political authoritarian conceptions (Section IV). Still, there are solid reasons to conclude that policies that resulted in bigger inequalities could only be imposed by cloaking them as egalitarian policies, and that the institutional structure of the Democratic and Social State still holds, even if increasingly under an inegalitarian assault (Section V). In such circumstances, the case for equality has to be made combining politico-philosophical and constitutional analyses, with special attention being paid to the implications of the indivisibility of fundamental rights and to the
grammar of egalitarian constitutional law; in particular, the three-fold structure of fundamental positions: subjective rights, collective rights and collective goods (Section VI).