100 humanizing the worldwill take the form of a shared surrender to beliefs that lend a patina of
naturalness, necessity, and authority to that settlement. Awareness of
the sanctity of the personal will be suppressed, or survive only as a re-
sidual hope, clinging to the familiar and to the intimate.
It is not the interpretation of interdependence and intersubjectivity
from the perspective of the sanctity of the personal that will turn the
social order into something more than the temporary resolution of an
ongoing confl ict; it is the practical imperative of the division of labor in
society. Suppose that the economy has already attained a level in the
development of its productive capabilities at which vast combinations
of people, put to work in specialized tasks, under stark hierarchical su-
pervision, can yield a large surplus over present consumption. Imagine,
however, that society has not yet reached the point at which we have
learned how to repeat most of the initiatives needed to produce such a
surplus, to express the activities susceptible to repetition in formulas,
and to embody the formulas in machines so that we can devote most of
our time to the actions that we do not yet know how to repeat.
Such an intermediate situation has been the circumstance of the
major historical civilizations, at least until very recently. It was in par-
tic u lar the circumstance of the agrarian- bureaucratic empires that rep-
resented, before the last two hundred years, the most important states
in the world. Th e world religions characteristically emerged at the pe-
riphery, rather than at the center, of such states.
Th is situation favored a strongly defi ned social division of labor: the
division of society among distinct classes, estates, or castes, reproduced
through the hereditary transmission of advantage, and marked by dis-
tinct forms of life and of consciousness as well as by diff erent degrees of
access to the key society- making resources of economic wealth, po liti-
cal power, and spiritual authority. A par tic u lar way of or ga niz ing the
social division of labor, and the distinct roles to which it gave rise, re-
duced the possible forms of cooperation to what the triumphant insti-
tutional and ideological settlement countenanced. Th e characteristic
Indo- European distinction between the rulers and priests, the war-
riors, the merchants, and the workers represented a simplifi ed and
widespread instance of such a system.
It is not that this hierarchical ordering of society into hereditary
classes was in any sense necessary, given these opportunities and limi-