Kolodny Against Hierarchy

We Homo Sapiens are, it is fair to say, status conscious creatures.We are all intimately familiar with the phenomenon: sometimes, in a given social context, one person or group is socially "above" (higher status than) or "below" (lower status than) another, in a difficult to articulate but deeply felt sense.These "vertical" relations are social hierarchies (henceforth, simply "hierarchies"), and they are a part of the everyday currency of social life.We quite naturally keep track of, and care deeply about, where we stand in the groups that matter to us.Though status relations and hierarchies have been with us for longer than we have been Homo Sapiens, they seem to be playing an especially prominent role in public discourse at the moment. 1 This is nowhere more prominent than in so-called "identity politics," on both the left and the right.On the left, there is a focus on the moral claims of vulnerable minorities (especially, but not exclusively, along the lines of race, ethnicity, and