ABSTRACT
The problem of hierarchy and its relation to the modern political imaginary is explored through reflections on the disjuncture of modernist understandings and the dynamics of hierarchy’s undermining and reconstitutions. Hierarchy has been a central concern of work on the modern political imaginary. The need to elucidate hierarchy’s deeper sources and its legitimations were some of the motivations behind Castoriadis’ development of the notion of the imaginary. Lefort’s interpretation of the political imaginary similarly commences from a critical analysis of the hierarchical form of bureaucracy and totalitarian political regimes. Charles Taylor’s contrasting conception of the imaginary likewise details a long-term process of the erosion of preceding forms of hierarchy and their justifications. In the contemporary period, the opposition to hierarchy has penetrated organizations and institutions that had previously been shaped by it, like the family, the capitalist firm, the school and the political movement. Despite the potentials of these initiatives, it is argued that many hierarchies have, to varying degrees, been reconstituted, both with respect to institutionalized power and the legitimating justifications for how things are organized. Critiques of hierarchy were once associated with the radical democratic imaginary; however, recent reactionary movements have mobilized perverse oppositions to hierarchy.
