Abstract
I proceed in four steps. First, I indicate what is to be understood by hierarchy and equality and the different areas in which this understanding can be at play. Second, I highlight that in the current era, it is through the mediation of equality that hierarchy is mainly apprehended. Third, I analyze how the relations between hierarchy and equality and their respective importance are connected with what passes for legitimacy and can vary with the context. Fourth, I focus on the principles or criteria, based on what actors now tend to see as just, that help to establish the right balance between hierarchy and equality. From the extent to which the institutions and actors in position of power take these principles/criteria seriously depends the extent to which they are viewed as legitimate.
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Notes
I borrow this expression from Kolodny (2023), p. 5.
The disparity of regard that a person has of herself and of others due to the fact that a person inhabits only one body, hers, is another issue.
There are different ways of treating others as of a different and lesser kind. Racial discrimination is one of them, perhaps the worst of all, since in the past it has allowed for the possibility of treating human beings inhumanely through slavery. Social discrimination against people of lower classes is another one.
In the context of war, women, individually and collectively, can be the victims of discrimination domestically and internationally. See Dower (1999), pp. 123–132, and Moon (1997). For a similar treatment of women in the context of the colonial mentality in China at the beginning of the twentieth century, refer to Singaravélou (2017), pp. 224–228.
That said, the experience of unfairness presupposes a sense of fairness.
See The United Nations, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights, accessed on December 1, 2023.
See, for instance, Scanlon (2018).
See, for instance, Herzog (2012), p. 108.
Saint-Simon shows in his Memoirs (see Saint-Simon 2007) that aristocrats’ contempt was not simply exercised against commoners. It was also at work in the hierarchies existing within the aristocracy itself. Life at the court at Versailles was the display of a “cascade des mépris” (waterfall of contempt).
This leads Paul Tucker to reflect on the conditions under which in democracy unelected power and, more specifically, Independent Agencies, can be legitimate, in Tucker (2018).
In it Together: Why Less Inequality Benefits All (Paris, OECD, 2015), p. 23, file:///C:/Users/admin/Downloads/In%20It%20Together%20Why%20Less%20Inequality%20Benefits%20All%20by%20OECD%20(z-lib.org).pdf, accessed on December 1, 2023.
The original position and the veil of ignorance that John Rawls calls upon to elaborate his conception of justice as fairness mobilize this type of sentiment. See Rawls (2005), pp. 22–28.
See, for instance, Rosanvallon (2021).
There are significant differences between European populism and American populism, which I do not touch upon here.
In France, think about Jean-Paul Mélenchon who has presided over the La France Insoumise group in the National Assembly from 2017 to 2021. In Spain, Podemos, founded in 2014, can also be described as left-wing populist party. In the United States, think about Bernie Sanders, the United States senator from Vermont who was once a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination during the 2016 U.S. presidential race. On left-wing populism, see Mouffe (2018).
In France, in 1988, the leader of the National Front (Front national), Jean-Marie Le Pen, showed the existence of a significant right-wing populist sensibility by gaining 14.39 percent of the votes in the first round of the presidential election. These gains were confirmed in the first round of the 2002 presidential election, with Le Pen receiving 16.86 percent of the votes. Afterward, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter, Marine Le Pen, as head of the National Rally (Rassemblement National), the party that has succeeded the National Front since 2018, has increased this populist influence. In 2017 and 2022, she arrived second behind Emmanuel Macron at the presidential election, receiving 33.90 percent of the votes in 2017 and 41.45 percent in 2022.
In a book on political meritocracy supporting the Chinese model Daniel Bell writes that political meritocracy is the idea that the political system should aim to select and promote public officials with above average ability and virtue by such means as examinations and performance evaluations. But he concedes that political meritocracy is not an easy sell. People are not eager to embrace political meritocracy over electoral democracy. He writes that even political cultures that value political meritocracy rapidly change and come to support democracy in the form of one person, one vote once the change is made. People in East Asian societies that adopted democratic forms of rule—from Japan to South Korea and Taiwan—all came to develop a preference for democracy over paternalistic Confucian legacies after the institutionalization of democracy. See Bell (2015), p. 166. Note also that although China is not a Western-type liberal democracy, the Chinese government states that China is democratic nonetheless.
Coicaud (2020), pp. 877–878.
The evaluation of legitimacy focuses on what political power is responsible for in connection with what passes for just. But all that is just is not supposed to be solely achieved by political power. For instance, as agents, individuals have their own role to play in the pursuit of justice. In their daily life, people can act justly or unjustly in their relations with others.
G. A. Cohen refers to legitimacy as the property of the situation against which there is not a just grievance, “Fairness and Legitimacy in Justice, And: Does Option Luck Ever Preserve Justice?”, in Cohen (2011), pp. 128–129.
The function of service is not specific to modernity and democracy. Thomas Piketty indicates that in pre-modern ternary societies (organized around nobility, clergy and common people), which he writes can be found throughout the world, the legitimacy of the two ruling classes—nobility and clergy—and of the social order they contributed to structure was linked to the services they rendered to the community. In the midst of brutal social relations, the nobility—the miliary class—provided security and the clergy—the religious and intellectual class—meaning. Refer to Piketty (2020), pp. 51–57.
In the contemporary context, this cannot happen simply through policies of redistribution of wealth. More is required.
Michael Walzer describes how needs and their hierarchy are not only physical phenomena. They are also connected to what is most valued in a history and a culture. In Walzer (1983), pp. 66 and 76.
See, ibid., pp.66–76.
On education, values, needs, and rights, see Walzer (1983), pp. 76–77. People are not the only ones who benefit from education. Education is also a tool for a country's social survival. A nation without educated people is unlikely to succeed in the world.
The original version is: “il n’y a pas d’amour, il n’y a que des preuves d’amour.”.
See, for instance, Furet (1999).
I borrow the expression “hyperglobalization” from Rodrik (2012), p. 70.
Paul Tucker refers to “undemocratic liberalism”, a system in which “too little of government is decided by the ballot box or heeds the welfare of the people.”, in Tucker (2018), pp. 3 and 555.
On libertarian thought, Nozick (2013). In “Capitalism, Freedom, and the Proletariat,” in Cohen (2011), pp. 147–165, G. A. Cohen writes that to think of capitalism as the realm of freedom, as libertarians do, is to overlook half of the nature of capitalism. For instance, property rights, which libertarians defend against all interferences, is a particular way of distributing freedom and unfreedom. It is associated with the liberty of private owners to do as they wish with what they own but it withdraws liberty from those who do not own it (p. 152). Beyond this, Cohen argues that libertarians do not care about liberty or freedom as such since they oppose interference with the rights of private property but support interference that limits access by the poor to that same private property (in “Freedom and Money,” ibid., p. 187). He adds that libertarians are all the more wrong about freedom that poverty (lack of money), which they do not oppose in the name of rejecting interference from the state to reduce poverty, is a lack of freedom (“Freedom and Money,” pp. 166–167).
Mixed economy involves some degree of public ownership firms combined with more traditional forms of private owned companies, along with public regulation and oversight of the financial system and of private capitalism more generally.
For example, social democracy in the Nordic countries is somewhat different than social democracy in France.
Social democracy has evolved over time.
Family (love) support is of course decisive.
In a damaged society, criminal behaviors and lack of respect for life’s value (the ease with which one can kill and be killed) are manifestations that people have stopped believing in the future, or at least in a future together.
For example, in Piketty (2020), Thomas Piketty shows how from the eighteenth century onward democratic ideas generated popular and collective mobilization and social struggles around issues of social justice, and debates about progressive taxation and redistribution of income and wealth (pp. 466–469). Piketty stresses how in the twentieth century the development of the fiscal and social state, with the increase in tax revenues and spending on education, health, pensions, unemployment insurance, and other social transfers supplanting the previously dominant regalian expenses (army, policy, courts, general administration and basic infrastructure) played a central role in this evolution (pp. 456–460).
Needless to say, diverse universality is a more complex and challenging form of universality than a uniform universality imposed by a powerful actor.
The preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights mentions “the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms.”.
See Henry Kissinger’s statement: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”.
Lack of respect can lead to lack of self-respect. Moreover, people who do not value themselves can be inclined to not take proper care of themselves and of others.
The massive demonstrations that have taken place in France from January to April 2023 against the project of pensions reform pushed by President Macron are not simply the product of a disagreement over this project. They are also an indication of a general social malaise that has been brewing in the country for years. Macron’s dismissive attitude vis-à-vis the oppositions, in parliament and in the street, has added fuel to the discontent and the democratic crisis.
French people’s focus on retirement has partly to do with the fact that they tend to not be happy at work. This is to some extent the case because they frequently do not feel valued and respected at work (For an interesting testimony on work culture in France, Fixon (2021). Beyond the context of work, the sentiment of lack of respect is a recurrent theme in France. When the value of equality is supposed to be central to the national mindset and mythology of a country, as is the case in France, inequalities and signs of disrespect are all the more resented throughout society.
See the work of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC), https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/reports?gclid=CjwKCAjwue6hBhBVEiwA9YTx8OOUwYe0HYk_Yv18zt2HixMcJg4SxreMqLzRSR1sxm6lrEO0z0LR4xoC-9wQAvD_BwE. Consult also Uitto, (2021), pp. 436–452.
On animal rights, see Francione and Garner (2010).
On this topic, Jackson (2017).
Michael Walzer (1983), pp. 10–11. Later in the book (p. 110), Walzer indicates that entrepreneurial success can be problematic for two sorts of reasons: extraction not only of wealth but of prestige and influence from the market, and deployment of power within it. Capital is not the only example Michael Walzer mentions of a dominant good that can be converted in all kinds of other goods and leads to a situation of domination and monopoly. He also refers to aristocracy’s monopoly based on birth and blood and its singular hold on land, office, and honor (p. 16) and to meritocracy resting on education, with eventually the members of the “educationally talented” group claiming that the good they control (education) should be dominant outside the school: offices, prerogatives, wealth too, should all be possessed by themselves (p. 14).
Ibid., p. 18, Walzer quotes the definition of tyranny Pascal proposes in Pensées: “The nature of tyranny is to desire power over the whole world and outside its own sphere. There are different companies—the strong, the handsome, the intelligent, the devout—and each man reigns in his own, not elsewhere. But sometimes, they meet, and the strong and the handsome fight for mastery—foolishly, for their mastery is of different kinds. They misunderstand one another, and make the mistake of each aiming at universal dominion. Nothing can win this, not even strength, for it is powerless in the kingdom of the wise… Tyranny. The following statements, therefore, are false and tyrannical: “Because I am handsome, so I should command respect.” “I am strong, therefore men should love me…” “I am… et cetera.” Tyranny is the wish to obtain by one means what can only be had by another. We owe different duties to different qualities: love is the proper response to charm, fear to strength, and belief to learning.”.
See, for instance, Walzer (1983), pp. 17–20.
A plurality of entry-points of goodness, meaning, and success is in contrast with a once-and-for-all selection process that does not allow lateral as well as upward movement throughout life.
Public goods are the opposite of private goods, which are inherently scarce and are paid for separately by individuals. The two main criteria that distinguish a public good are that it must be non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Non-rivalrous means that the goods do not dwindle in supply as more people consume them; non-excludability means that the good is available to all citizens. For a definition and analysis of public goods, refer to Kaul and Mendoza (2003), pp. 78–111.
For instance, the post office can be seen as a public good, since it is used by a large portion of the population and is financed by taxpayers. However, using the post office does require some nominal costs, such as paying for postage.
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The author thanks the two anonymous peer reviewers and Sara I. Dixon for their comments.
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Coicaud, JM. Today’s Political Puzzle: Hierarchy, Equality and Legitimacy. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-023-00399-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-023-00399-5