Social Hierarchy and the Sovereign Individual
The Enlightenment arguments that explain why free societies unlock human flourishing
Positional inequalities among individuals, often staggering in proportion, are constitutive features of the various social, political, and economic hierarchies that pervade human society. Granted individual freedoms — and consequently both intra- and inter-hierarchy mobility (the capacity to move from one position to another) — free persons order themselves into unequal hierarchies. The few who successfully maintain positions atop an ordering accumulate many magnitudes more capital (sometimes political or social, often monetary) than the many who occupy the lower levels of the hierarchy.1
Each trade can thus be understood as a hierarchy of individuals, where inequality of position between individuals within the order occurs at any given moment. Positionally unequal hierarchies that constitute the polis, when oriented by respect for the sovereign individual, unleash incredible creativity and innovation.
In this essay, I examine the nature of the social hierarchies that undergird the polis and contend that economic growth and political equality are mutually reinforcing phenomena. The polis will achieve both faster growth and greater political equality when it reaffirms the sovereignty of the individual.
I) Humanity Is Chained to Social Hierarchy, Which Gravitates Toward Rigidity
Hierarchy formation and maintenance are central components of human social and civilizational life. Serotonin, the three-billion-year-old hormone that mediates nervous systems and regulates mood, “contributes to the formation of social hierarchy and positively affects dominance in humans and other primates.”2 In a world of scarcity, individuals mediate disputes over ideas and resources via deference to an encoded social hierarchy.3 Observance of and acquiescence to the dominance hierarchy is a survivable trait — resource disputes are better mediated, and conflicts avoided. “Neurotransmitter systems … modulate and are modulated by the formation of the social hierarchy in a group.”4 In any social activity, regardless of scale, the serotonin-based individual places him or herself in a dominance hierarchy and confers deference on other individuals in accordance with their conception of their relative place in that order.
Throughout history, humanity’s natural tendency toward social hierarchy drives social and political organization. To paraphrase Rousseau: man is born in chains, and everywhere is in chains.5
For most of history, the social hierarchy was oppressive and rigid. To inherit an entrenched, immovable position within a highly stratified and static regime has been the situation of most individuals throughout the history of civilization. Resources were disproportionately afforded to individuals atop the hierarchy while most individuals throughout history — the overwhelming majority of all humans ever, in fact — lived short and bleak lives of servitude or slavery.
Static social hierarchies are maintained by way of merciless coercion, commanded by those at the top of the hierarchy and executed unwaveringly by deferential social positions below.6 Hobbes explains: “The greatest of human powers is that which is compounded of the powers of most men … that has the use of all their powers depending on his will … Therefore to have servants is power.”7 Structural forces within the biology and neurology of each individual collectively reinforced a rigid and brutal social order.
Indeed, while modern advances in history and evolutionary biology rebuke much of Hobbes’s conception of pre-civilization, his fundamental description of pre-capitalism rings true: “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Likewise, while Rousseau’s romantic conception of pre-civilization is inaccurate, his “first man … who enclosed a piece of ground” — the leader of a proto-civilized social hierarchy — certainly oversaw “crimes, wars and murders … horrors and misfortunes.”8
II) Enlightenment Thinking Beckons Unprecedented Freedom and Equality by Imbuing the Individual with Sovereignty
The Classical West first attempted to rethink the nature of social hierarchy by considering political equality. Early experiments with political equality in ancient Athens invited limited fluidity9 into the order: the hierarchy of individuals was periodically reoriented by the collective action (votes) of the group. The Roman Republic furthered these aims, instating regular elections of political leaders, conceiving a proto-checks and balances system among the politically powerful, and, most importantly, enumerating core principles to govern the hierarchy itself.10 At the center of these efforts was the core Western (sometimes called Liberal, capital L) doctrine of political equality: a sovereign being, the individual, is distinct from his or her current position in the hierarchy.
Sovereignty is measured by an individual’s ability to reposition themselves in the inevitable social hierarchy. Thus, during and after the Enlightenment, freedom was meaningfully realized for the first time when societies embraced equality of opportunity. John Stuart Mill famously defines the role of government in his free society: “the government may justifiably exercise power over individuals, against their will, only to prevent harm to others.”11 Therefore, the role of the polis is to ensure that individuals do not constrict the opportunities of other individuals.12 In this idealized free polis, individuals obey not other individuals, but foundational principles derived from fundamental truths. Kant explains, “Man is free if he needs obey no person but solely the laws.”13
Even Marx fundamentally agrees, linking equality between individuals to an imperative of freedom under his conception of human nature. “Because [man] treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being.”14
There can be no equality without freedom. In both precapitalist societies and societies of equal outcomes, prescribed positions under the social hierarchy necessitate extreme stratification. The coercion necessary to maintain a rigid hierarchy — as seen in precapitalist history and socialist regimes aimed at equal outcomes — presupposes the separation of individuals into sovereign and non-sovereign political domains. Hayek explains: “Hence arises the clash between planning and democracy.”15 As such, political equality cannot endure in unfree social hierarchies.16
The philosophical notion of a sovereign individual thus invites political equality into the inevitably hierarchical organization of human life. Political equality is achieved when each individual is respected as a sovereign political actor. In this capacity, the individual may have an equal opportunity to inhabit the position of any other individual, if they so choose, insofar as their pursuit does not reduce the freedom of anyone else.
Thus, the degree of fluidity among and within the social hierarchies of the polis determines the extent of both political equality and freedom within the polis. The idealized politically equal society that respects the sovereign individual affords social mobility to the individual, and the polis is thus built upon dynamic social hierarchies. These ideals and institutions thereby preclude coercion and hierarchical rigidity: “Democratic assemblies cannot function as planning agencies. They cannot produce agreement on everything – the whole direction of the resources of the nation – for the number of possible courses of action will be legion.”17
Western (capital-L) Liberal free societies are, therefore, the most politically equal. As a precondition, each individual is represented in government and granted an equal vote on political leadership. Moreover, because any free individual could and may inhabit the position of any other free individual in the polis, the tangible inequalities between persons paradoxically function as evidence that all individuals are fundamentally equal. In other words, while individual freedom yields unequal outcomes between individuals, the abundance of varied possible outcomes proves that individuals are essentially equal in being.18
When the polis endorses Mill’s opportunity principle and governs via only those norms and institutions that buttress his opportunity principle, the polis instantiates political equality and freedom.
III) Political Equality Is the Prerequisite for Growth19
New goods and services and improvements in the ways goods and services are produced, advertised, or sold — that is, innovation — propel economic growth. Existing as a sovereign being outside of one’s inhabited position, the individual, with consent and support from others, leverages hierarchal ordering to advance the society.
III.A) Growth Occurs Only When Innovation is Possible
Three interrelated conditions are necessary for an individual or a group to innovate: 1) Motivation,20 2) Capability,21 and 3) Opportunity.22 The precapitalist world permitted growth only in exceptional moments when these essential criteria were met.23
The lack of political equality in the precapitalist world doomed society to economic stagnation.24 For most of history, an individual’s immovable position in the social order was the difference between life and death, starvation and satiation, intelligence and ignorance, slavery and freedom. “There is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently, no culture of the earth.”25 Precapitalist social hierarchies were rigid and hegemonic — even the best off were slaves to position in their respective hierarchies. Consequently, these rigid social orders were largely devoid of economic growth.
III.B) Political Equality Drives Innovation and Growth
Political equality begets fluid social hierarchies, which unleash economic growth in this new world. Spencer explains, “Liberalism habitually stood for individual freedom versus State-coercion.”26 Because coercion must be justified in the free society, ascent through the social hierarchy requires the consent of other individuals. For an enterprise to succeed, there must be demand for its products. Adam Smith argues: “The market price … is … the proportion between the quantity … and the demand of those who are willing to pay.”27 For an individual to succeed, there must be demand for his or her contributions. Hobbes continues: “The value or worth of a man is, as of all other things, his price … his power … is not absolute, but a thing dependent on the need and judgment of another.”28
If a hierarchy of individuals is tyrannical in the idealized free society, its constitutive members may freely leave. Entire hierarchies rise and fall over time based on the attitudes of surrounding individuals.29 In general, the social hierarchies of the idealized capitalist world are mediated by competence, authority, and merit rather than power. Social hierarchy can only be aimed toward these ideals when the sovereign individual is respected as more than his or her inhabited position. While this principle is not fully actualized, it is better met under these philosophical principles than under any illiberal system (past and present).
The division and subsequent specialization of labor — the natural and continuous organization and reorganization of positions within economic hierarchies — underpins innovation and growth.30 Granted the capacity to reorganize positions within the hierarchy of production — and even create new positions — the imaginative innovator may freely actualize innovation. Likewise, the free society enables the laborer unprecedented positional autonomy — a rural life of positional stasis becomes a relatively freer life where one may change their employment. In principle, the common laborer may, too, become the innovating producer. Thus, while Schumpeter and Smith disagree on the gravitation of markets and prices, Schumpeter agrees with Smith about the intrinsic nature of human potential unleashed by the free organization of hierarchies within capitalist society: “that capitalist enterprise … and technological progress … were essentially one and the same thing.”31
The fluid social hierarchies of free peoples in the capitalist world create the best environment for economic growth. Each of the above preconditions for growth is best achieved as free and politically equal individuals naturally formulate and reformulate increasingly fluid social hierarchies.32
Each of the below highly correlated graphs follows from one another, depicting the rapid increase in opportunity for billions of individuals as free society principles and capitalist markets expand.
IV) Deviance from Enlightenment Free Society Principles Risks Tyranny and Stagnation
The core principles of a free society counter humanity’s natural tendency toward rigid and oppressive social hierarchy. When poleis abandon the tenets of the free society, tyranny and stagnation abound.
IV.A) The Pursuit of Prescribed Outcome is Slavery
Critics of capitalism often codify disparities in social, political, and economic position as evidence of unnatural inequality. Some anti-capitalist thinkers and activists thus call for various equalities of outcome. “There is that increasing need for administrative compulsions and restraints.”33 If individuals are repositioned — if what people have or do is made equal across society — political equality will prevail, they claim. “Socialists … believe that our economic life should be ‘consciously directed’, that we should substitute ‘economic planning’ for the competitive system.”34
This thinking is wrongheaded. Equality of position (sometimes called equality of outcome) defies human biology and is an impossible paradigm to actualize.
When pursued, the illusion of equal outcomes fosters unfreedom. If outcomes are equal, outcomes are prescribed. If outcomes are made to be equal, outcomes are coerced.35 Equality of outcome presupposes tyrannical inequality in that it necessitates a sovereign arbiter. Some sovereignty must be elevated to 1) choose the proper outcome by which individuals must be made equal and 2) reposition naturally unequal individuals to be equal along that axis and continue to equalize individuals as they inevitably deviate. “Planning for security of the second kind … has such an insidious effect on liberty … planning designed to protect individuals or groups against diminutions of their incomes.”
Moreover, unfreedom driven by the doctrine of equal outcome compounds over time: “Every additional State-interference strengthens the tacit assumption that it is the duty of the State to deal with all evils and secure all benefits.”36
Regimes aimed at equality of position ironically demand a particularly rigid and brutal social hierarchy. The conflation of political equality with equality of outcome confuses the masses and invites tyranny. “The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held.” Rousseau’s timeless wisdom proves useful in this regard: “All ran headlong to their chains, in hopes of securing their liberty.”37
A polis of equal outcomes is a polis enslaved.
Once again, even Marx recognizes unfreedom within rigid social hierarchies. “In degrading spontaneous, free activity to a means, estranged labor makes man’s species-life a means to his physical existence.”38 Marx and the Liberal capitalists thus share a disdain for rigid social hierarchies characterized by prescribed positions. Fundamentally, Marx takes issue with static social hierarchies mediated by power and coercion, which is the same critique that Liberals levy against societies of prescribed outcomes. In this way, Marx’s vision of capitalist society can be understood as a society of equal outcomes (albeit separated into two unequal classes): the proletariat and bourgeois class are intractably entrenched.
The structure of the human brain, and consequently the structure of human society, supplies the perfect conditions for oppressive and rigid social hierarchies. “A general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”39 Ignorant of human nature, the doctrine of equal outcomes falls into the trap of biology and reifies unyielding positional tyranny.
In attempting to rebel against human nature, equal outcome advocates simply empower human nature’s most brutal impulses. The extent of prescribed equal outcome is inversely proportional to freedom in the polis: “The degree of his slavery varies according to the ratio between that which he is forced to yield up and that which he is allowed to retain.”40 Legitimate disdain for positional entrenchment does not justify positional prescription; positional prescription will not actualize positional equality.
IV.B) Prescribed Outcome Precludes Growth
For all the reasons explained in III., the social fluidity which conditions innovation cannot occur when the hierarchical position of the individual is static. Hayek explains: “The division of labour has gone far beyond what could have been planned.”41 If free societies succumb to hierarchical rigidity, growth will cease in tandem with freedom.42
V) Rejection of Rigid Social Hierarchy Actualizes the Idealized Free Polis
Social hierarchy formation is natural and inevitable, and political equality is directly proportional to economic growth. Therefore, the polis can promote both economic growth and political equality by intervening in markets only when the individual is made unfree — positioned as slave to a rigid social hierarchy and unable to reposition.43 The great fears of both socialists and capitalists will thus be pacified by a polis anchored by the sovereign individual.
Social hierarchy trends toward rigidity. Rigid and oppressive hierarchy is the story of human history, and both left-wing and right-wing ideologies contain oppressive instincts.44 On the left, equal opportunity advocates believe that rigid markets must be corrected by equalized positionality.45 Meanwhile, on the right, market rigidity cements former innovators in positions of power and forestalls future innovation. Schumpeter concludes: “[capitalism’s] very success undermines the social institutions which protect it.”46 The dual dogma of entrenched hierarchy threatens both freedom and growth. Only the sovereign individual can fend off both threats to the free polis.
Like equality of outcome, fully actualized equal opportunity may also be an unattainable ideal. However, as it is pursued, equality of opportunity will only foster greater freedom. Conversely, the pursuit of equal outcome will inevitably engender tyranny. The polis ought to actively separate the individual from his inhabited social location, reaffirming the sovereignty of each person.
Hobbes 1651; Italian economist and sociologist Vincent Pareto’s famous power-law probability distribution empirically confirms the unequal distribution of wealth in any given society. Hobbes too discovers this wisdom: “the nature of power is, in this point, like to fame, increasing as it proceeds; or like the motion of heavy bodies, which, the further they go, make still the more haste.”
Ziomkiewicz 2016.
Watanabe & Yamamoto 2015: “Individuals’ perceptions of their own level of dominance or of the dominance level of others … are crucial for living within a social environment.”
Watanabe & Yamamoto cont.
Rousseau 1755: “man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.”
At this time, the individual himself could often be understood as no more than his current position within the social hierarchy.
Hobbes 1651.
Rousseau 1755; Rousseau’s depiction of behavior in human civilization is a depiction of human nature or manifestations of encoded evolutionary systems. As such, Rousseau’s conception of history should be inverted. Inevitable social hierarchy became more, not less, equal over time. Rousseau’s description of civilization well describes pre-civilization: “the destruction of equality was attended by the most terrible disorders.”
Motion, the entropic force which pushes atomized individuals; the inversion of stasis; or the inversion of the manifestation of order.
The Twelve Tables, the foundation of ancient Roman law, state the rights and responsibilities of Roman citizens – establishing a higher sovereignty to which even the temporal sovereign must bow. Remarkably, the Roman Republic even made efforts to empower the economically worst off. In 494 BC, the Tribuni Plebis were established to represent the marginalized class of Plebeians.
Mill 1859, Locke 1689; Mill learns from Locke: “all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”
Hobbes 1651; Hobbes introduces the relationship between social equality and freedom: “Fear of oppression disposeth a man to anticipate or to seek aid by society: for there is no other way by which a man can secure his life and liberty.”
Kant 1797.
Marx 1844, Marx 1858; Marx’s notion of freedom as the individual’s ability to manifest independent of the hierarchy: “The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working-out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick?”
Hayek 1945.
Spencer 1884; Once again, unfree rigid hierarchies are a consequence of human nature: “The defective natures of citizens will show themselves in the bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into.”
Hayek 1945.
Granted, the line between opportunity and outcome is blurry and variable. Is admittance to an academic institution an opportunity or an outcome? If the final metric is one’s ability to receive a college GPA, for example, college admittance becomes outcome. Conversely, if society is concerned with post-graduate earnings, college admittance becomes opportunity. Any social position may be an opportunity in one sense and an outcome in another. While this is a technical problem, it is not a practical impediment. In respecting their sovereignty, societies can pursue an order in which individuals have relatively equal opportunity to achieve any possible social position. In general, Liberal societies in the West do this best.
OED 2021; Economic growth is defined straight-forwardly by Oxford’s English dictionary: “an increase in the amount of goods and services produced per head of the population over a period of time.”
Positive incentives that outweigh negative deterrents measured by some form of capital (personal, political, social, or monetary, etc.). Ex: Seeing Galileo imprisoned, and Bruno burned, a fledging seventeenth-century Venetian astronomer may choose instead to study theology.
Physical and/or human tools; access to or communication with specific knowledge or necessary prerequisites. Ex: How far could Einstein progress without the wisdom of Newton?
A life of sufficient duration, health, and temperament to actualize a particular innovation.
In these rare occurrences, sovereigns either authorized certain subordinates to reposition themselves in the social hierarchy or the sovereign conceived of the innovation themself.
Before capitalism, societies with relative respect for the sovereign individual were the first to experience meaningful growth. Political equality in the Roman world — albeit limited — enabled an unprecedented quantity of individuals to innovate. As such, wealth and innovation in Classical Rome outpaced most of the world.
Hobbes 1651.
Spencer 1884.
Smith 1776.
Hobbes 1651.
Schumpeter 1942; Schumpeter writes: “Situations emerge in the process of creative destruction in which many firms may have to perish that nevertheless would be able to live on vigorously and usefully if they could weather a particular storm.”
Smith 1776; Smith provides a set of reasons explaining why the division of labor increases output and invites innovation. But crucially, he contends that innovation ultimately stems from a natural component of human social life: “division of labour … [is] the very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature … the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.”
Schumpeter 1942.
Smith 1776, Schumpeter 1942.
Spencer 1884.
Hayek 1945.
Hayek 1945; Hayek writes: “coercion … [is] essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible.”
Spencer 1884.
Rousseau 1775.
Marx 1844.
Hobbes 1651.
Spencer 1884.
Hayek 1945.
Even China proves the rule. 1) China only achieved economic growth when it invited limited Liberal principles into its economy, and 2) central government planning — especially the one-child policy and shadow banking — pose dramatic economic threats to the PRC. If China abandoned planning in favor of Liberalism, its economy would grow even faster.
Marx 1844, Hayek 1945; Marx’s fundamental fear is of rigidity in the social hierarchy and subsequent unfreedom: “the worker becomes ever more exclusively dependent on labour, and on a particular, very one-sided, machine-like labour at that”, “The concentration of capital increases, the big capitalists ruin the small, and a section of the erstwhile capitalists sinks into the working class, which as a result of this supply again suffers to some extent a depression of wages and passes into a still greater dependence on the few big capitalists.”
Hayek provides the Liberal answer: “The liberal argument does not advocate leaving things just as they are; it favours making the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of coordinating human efforts … The successful use of competition does not preclude some types of government interference. For instance, to limit working hours, to require certain sanitary arrangements, to provide an extensive system of social services is fully compatible with the preservation of competition.”
Hayek 1945; “Great danger lies in the policies of two powerful groups, organized capital and organized labour.”
The left seeks complete fluidity, that entropic force which topples hierarchies and individuals. The right seeks rigidity and the maintenance of the existing order. Both forces — the inseparable yin and yang of the polis — are indispensable. The hierarchy enables growth and can never be fully abolished. The left is a critical check: constantly challenging the hierarchy’s tyrannical gravitation.
Schumpeter 1942; One may invoke Schumpeter to rebut this paper’s advocacy, claiming that rigidity, not fluidity, is the key to innovation. In fact, neither I nor Schumpeter defend that position. While Schumpeter accurately describes the tendency of innovating enterprise toward monopoly, he believes this is only a temporary condition. As such, the process of creative destruction evidence fluidity not rigidity over time.
Moreover, I simply argue that respect for the sovereign individual will propel growth. Indeed, it may be true that an innovating monopoly may temporarily reduce the freedoms of certain individuals in certain domains. However, the product of innovation will also expand freedom for more individuals and in perpetuity. And irrespective of that, the process of creative destruction necessarily completes when free individuals challenge hegemonic stasis.
Most importantly, though, a preeminent doctrine of individual sovereignty will enable the polis to best determine when the inevitable innovating monopoly crosses a threshold and creates more unfreedom than freedom.