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Craig Browne (2019)Social Epistemology, 33(5), pp. 398-409Abstract. 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 Cornelius Castoriadis’ development of the notion of the imaginary. The work of Claude Lefort on the political imaginary similarly commences from a critical analysis of the hierarchical form of bureaucracy and its place in the constitution of totalitarian political regimes. In a different vein, Charles Taylor’s conception of the imaginary 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 organisations and institutions that had previously been shaped by it, like the family, the capitalist firm, the school, and the political movement. Despite the potentials that these initiatives suggest of a change in the political imaginary, it will be argued that forms of hierarchy have, to varying degrees, been reconstituted and that the problem of hierarchy appears in new ideological forms, both with respect to institutionalised power and the legitimating justifications for how things are organised. The critique of hierarchy was once associated with the radical democratic imaginary, however, there have recently been perverse mobilisations.Keywords: Hierarchy, political imaginary, control, Cornelius CastoriadisExcerpt.  "Of course, the dominant  tendency of modern political theory and political institutions has been  the reordering of hierarchy according to different principles to those  that structured premodern hierarchy. Luc Boltanski and Laurent  Thévenot’s book On Justification effectively illustrates the latter  process in describing how the six different polities that they explicate  with reference to exemplars from the history of modern  political philosophy each involve two processes that are constitutive  of their regimes of justification. First, there is the polities  application of a principle of ‘equivalence’ in the categorising of  people and things. Second, there is the institution of  a principle of difference in order to rank people and things into a  hierarchical arrangement. The latter relates to a primary value of that  polity, like that of ‘utility’ in the ‘industrial polity’ or ‘fame’ in  the ‘inspired polity’, and then serves to constitute  a ‘higher common good’ that is necessary for the resolution of  conflict. Boltanski and Thévenot demonstrate the incorporation of a  non-hierarchical principle into the modern political construction of  hierarchy. The ordering according to the principle of difference  leads to the reconstruction of hierarchy around the principle of  ‘worth’ or justice."Link to the review