Hierarchy

In conservative political thought, hierarchy refers to a structured ordering of social functions, authority, and obligation that arises from the natural differences of human capacity, vocation, and circumstance. The conservative defence of hierarchy is not a defence of any particular hierarchy at any particular moment, and is sharply distinguished from defences of caste, racial ordering, or self-interested oligarchy. The position is that some structured ordering is unavoidable in any cooperative human community, that pretending otherwise produces concealed and less accountable orderings, and that the visible inherited orderings of a free society are usually preferable on prudential grounds to the alternatives produced by their forced flattening.

The position is widely misread because the modern egalitarian premise — that all hierarchies are illegitimate by default — is so deeply embedded in contemporary political vocabulary that the conservative defence reads as defence of privilege rather than as analysis of social structure.

Key Takeaways

• In conservative political thought, a structured ordering of social functions and authority that arises from the natural differences of human capacity, vocation, and obligation.
• Distinguished from caste (rigid hereditary status) and from oligarchy (rule by an interested minority): a defensible hierarchy is functional, accountable, and accessible by merit.
• Defended by Russell Kirk as one of the six canons of conservative thought; by Roger Scruton as the structure of any society capable of transmitting inherited goods.

History And Context

The classical philosophical defence of hierarchy runs from Plato’s Republic (functional differentiation as the principle of the just city) through Aristotle’s Politics (the polis as a structured association of unequal contributors to the common good) into the medieval scholastic tradition. Aquinas’s account of the common good in De Regno and the Summa Theologiae treats the structured differentiation of functions as essential to the perfection of the political community.

The modern critique of hierarchy as such — distinct from critique of any particular hierarchy — emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) re-grounded political authority in equal individual fear of death, dissolving the older account of hierarchy as natural. Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) treated all social hierarchies as historical impositions on a primitively equal natural condition. The French Revolution attempted the political programme that followed from these premises.

Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is the founding modern conservative response. Burke argued that the inherited orders of a society — its corporations, ranks, professions, and accumulated honours — are not arbitrary impositions but the visible deposits of long communal trial and error, and that their abolition by rationalist redesign produces neither equality nor liberty but the rule of whatever new minority is best positioned to capture the resulting power vacuum. The Jacobin Republic and Napoleonic Empire confirmed the prediction in his lifetime.

The Conservative Position

Three components of the conservative defence of hierarchy are distinguishable.

First, the descriptive claim: structured orderings of authority, function, and obligation are unavoidable in any cooperative human activity. A family, a workshop, an army, a university, a parish, a corporation — each of these is hierarchical in some respects, and the hierarchies are typically the conditions under which the cooperative activity is possible at all. The pretence that an organisation has no hierarchy usually means that its hierarchy has been concealed and made less accountable, not that it has been removed.

Second, the prudential claim: visible inherited hierarchies, accumulated over generations and constrained by accumulated custom and reciprocal obligation, are usually preferable to hierarchies produced by recent political action. The visible ones can be reformed incrementally; the recent ones are typically the property of a self-conscious revolutionary class and are more dangerous in their early decades than the inherited ones they replaced.

Third, the normative criterion: defensible hierarchies are functional, accountable, and accessible by merit; they exist for the sake of the community’s common good, not for the interest of those at the top. Hierarchies that are merely hereditary, racially defined, or self-perpetuating without functional contribution lose their claim to defence. The conservative tradition has been internally divided on which inherited hierarchies pass this test in which periods.

Differing Positions

Egalitarian liberal political thought (Rawls’s tradition, the Dworkin-Sen capabilities tradition) treats unequal social positions as requiring positive justification by reference to the worst-off; conservative responses (Robert Nozick, Roger Scruton in Conservative Thinkers) treat the demand for justification as itself requiring justification. The dispute reaches into questions of property, inheritance, education, and labour markets.

Within conservatism, libertarians and traditionalists differ on which hierarchies are defensible. Libertarians defend hierarchies that arise from voluntary exchange (markets, employment, voluntary associations) but are sceptical of hierarchies enforced by state action (established churches, hereditary peerages). Traditionalists defend the inherited cultural and religious hierarchies that the libertarian framework cannot fully accommodate.

Liberation theology and intersectional political theory treat conservative hierarchy-defence as a category that bundles defensible functional differentiation with indefensible historical impositions in ways that render the conservative case incoherent. Conservative replies (Thomas Sowell, Roger Scruton, Yuval Levin) typically distinguish more carefully and concede that some inherited orderings have been indefensible without conceding the broader case.

References

1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. C. D. Clark (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001 [1790]), 86–98, 169–180.
2. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7th rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2001 [1953]), 8–10.
3. Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, 3rd ed. (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press, 2002), chs. 2, 4.
4. Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (New York: Basic Books, 2014), chs. 4, 6.