roachboy

tiberry: i do not see the linkages in your post. maybe i'll paste it and pull it apart a little.

in the abstract yes, but it becomes quickly obvious, once you start to think about it, that the matter is not so simple. piaget's general position (very general) is that the "hardwiring" which forms the infrastructure for cognition unfolds as a function of and in ways shaped by the social environment. if that is true, then the seperation from a particular mode of subvjectivity and the social becomes a problem--in other words, if you start from here, it is impossible to later pretend that anything can be understood by reverting to a notion of an isolated individual which gazes out from a discrete position over the social world as if that world was a spectacle. from this follow all kinds of difficulties.

this is a jump, logically. how exactly do you get from the general claim in the previous sentence to these equally general characterizations of what i assume is "the social"?
things get murky right away if you are not careful (same goes for me, naturlich)

do you imagine that there is but a single type of hierarchy?

are you imagining, like aristotle in "the politics" for example, that there is a hierarchical distribution of competences in any given population, but that this distribution is not obvious from superficial indices--so a "good city" would be that which would allow generational distributions to play themselves out in the world (a way of looking at aristotle that brings him into line with nietzsche, or vice versa)

i would argue that the question of hierarchy is basic for any political thought, tht there are a number of ways to consider the matter, and that you short circuit the whole problem of politics if you imagine social hierarchy to reflect anything close of a nautral hierarchy.

well, one implication of the piaget-type position (there are many other possible ways to frame this, but i'll stick with piaget because he is kinda well-known, but not usually as someone mustered in a political philosophy type context) is that the kind of person/subject a given formation produces is the mirror image of itself, of its norms, of its general conceptions (refracted through the politics of the family, the politics built into education, etc etc etc)....which would then mean that the assumptions concerning hierarchy you might find operating in folk who come up at a given period in a given space are internalized versions of the dominant ideology of the period.

i could make this more explicit if you like--but the conclusion is that there would be no tendency on the part of human beings in general to understand questions of hierarchy in any particular way. that this, along with almost eveyr other cognitive faculty, would have to be functional in a given social space should on its own be enough to make you think about your position.

second, since you never looked at the question of what hierarchy might entail (as a function of more general political visions of the world) you assume a single meaning for it and derive a series of conclusions from that---it is not obvious that the fact of hierarchy necessarily entails an evasion of responsability. for example, if you had a direct democratic situation, there would be hierarchy (a certain kind of division of labour) but there would also be the permanent potential that the people who occupy positions as a function of that division of labour could be recalled by the collective. would this entail a dissolution of responsibility?

[QUOTE] Further, I'd say that if you removed another human trait, greed, from the equation - then you'd probably have a hard time finding leaders![/QUOTE}

i dont follow you here at all. the premise seems to me arbitrary, so the conclusion makes no sense to me.

i hope this is clear enough to continue a conversation. compression is always a problem. i suspect it really is one here.

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