Althought ​the idea of equality can be traced back to Antiquity, it bocame one of the dominant ideas of modernity. The most contemporary political and moral idolatries have been related to it, apart from the unpleasant consequences of politics aiming equality, its unquestionable prestige and importance are undiminished.
It is hard to explain why people –allegedly equal by nature- live in unequal relations throughout written history. As there are several versions of inequality and the policies to eliminate them, there are several explanations of the existence of unequal relations of equal people.
Political relation contains rule, so the state is probably the very institute which make clear most profoundly the inequalities. Some people would demolish it because of that, while other would use it for the elimination of inequalities.
The essays of the book written by the fellows of the Thomas Molnar Institute for Advanced Studies (Budapest) refer to these problems in the context of the history of ideas.