IT is reported that after Thomas Babington Macaulay, the nineteenth-century British historian and statesman, delivered a typically emphatic speech in the House of Commons, one of his colleagues remarked to another, “By God, I wish I were as sure of anything as Macaulay is of everything.” As I read Brian Barry’s Culture and Equality, † that quotation rushed unbidden into my mind. Barry has delivered a thumping book, brimming with certitude, written in what Alan Wolfe has recently called a “take no prisoners” style. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I am one of the combatants Barry chooses to shoot rather than incarcerate.)