The Constitution of Hierarchy

A Recently Published Paper

A brief note to circulate my paper The Constitution of Hierarchy, just published in the Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences. I presented an early version at a conference at Franciscan University in Steubenville in 2022, and presented a revised draft as a lecture at Fudan University in Shanghai last year. I’m grateful to have received most helpful comments from a number of colleagues, including Bai Tongdong, Daniel Bell, Conor Casey, Guo Sujian, and John Pang.

The central claim of the paper is that “[t]he mainstream of traditional Western legal thought developed an elaborate conception of justified hierarchy, indeed a set of legal principles I have called the ‘constitution of hierarchy.’ The basic justification was that a hierarchy of law, ruled by law (albeit a non-liberal conception of law) was necessary to displace unjust hierarchies of elite power and corruption that would otherwise obtain.”

The abstract is below.

For a related paper, which applies the conceptual framework developed in The Constitution of Hierarchy to the American presidential and administrative state, see my forthcoming paper on The Many and the Few.

Hope you enjoy!