"'the origin of social inequality' is not a problem that would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchies were assumed to have existed from the very beginning. [...] 'Social equality'--and therefore, its opposite, inequality--simply did not exist as a concept" (32)
"the terms 'equality' and 'inequality' only began to enter common currency in the early seventeenth century, under the influence of natural law theory. And natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of Europe's discoveries in the New World" (32)
"The legal and philosophical question [of natural law theory is] what rights to human beings have simply by dint of being human -- that is, what rights could they be said to have 'naturally'" (33)