> [!summary] Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### Introduction - Imaginary Equality > [Hierarchy] is a system for allocating status and access to resources, whether of food, sex, money, or power, and of establishing the criteria upon which that is to be done. Hierarchy is a way of facilitating social order, and as such, it most often enjoys social sanction, conferring legitimate authority. Indeed, human beings cannot live without hierarchies. They form spontaneously even in very small groups, and they inevitably grow more elaborate as those groups expand, helping us to work together and get along. Hierarchy, in other words, is not the same thing as domination (illegitimate authority), which is based more explicitly on force and threat, even if the line between them is often thin. > equality claims are regularly invoked to contest or contain established hierarchies. But they invariably carry hierarchical assumptions of their own—ideas about who is equal and who is not, and what a just arrangement of the two would be. > hierarchies based on equality claims can shade quickly, like hierarchy itself, into domination. For to assert a community of equals is to do so by way of reference to those who are not part of the community, meaning that equality, inequality, and exclusion are always entwined. > Human beings are good at banishing “unequals” from their midst. Over the long run, ideas of equality have been used just as often to consolidate the position of elites in power as to contest or overthrow them. # Quotes