ABSTRACT

The alliance of individualism and hierarchy may be called, in current parlance, "the establishment." From this mixed-motive coalition individualists gain stability in property relationships and defense against outsiders, while hierarchy receives the enhanced economic growth to pay off its promises to future generations. An alliance with fatalism comports well with the egalitarian cosmology that tells its members that the establishment is coercive and inegalitarian. Egalitarians are deterred from allying with either individualism or hierarchy for reasons that have to do with both the nature of egalitarianism and egalitarianism's relation to other active ways of life. Cultural theory argues that there are few experienceable patterns of social relationships: ego-focused networks, egalitarian-bounded groups, and hierarchically nested groups, each of which, in maximizing its constituents' transactions, forms itself into a dynamic equilibrium. Many plans for social reconstruction remain utopian because they fail to take into account the ineradicability of bias and the relations of dependence that exist between the rival ways of life.