This paper traces the large-scale abandonment of hierarchical models of society by human scientists in the aftermath of 1968. The late 20th century saw these scholars emphasizing the contractual and ‘egalitarian’ relations between actors, at the expense of relations predicated on status differences and the differentiation of function relative to a totality. It simultaneously argues that these scholarly developments hinged on a set of socio-economic conditions in Europe and the USA which defined ever-growing numbers of social forms in terms of the commodity. The great paradox, of course, is that the same historical moment in which the social was ‘flattened’ by human scientists also witnessed the emergence of new structural inequalities on an unprecedented scale. The paper concludes that this realization is leading to a resurgence of hierarchical models in the human sciences.
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