humanizing the world 101tations; a much more egalitarian and fl exible regime of cooperation
might, and sometimes did, face the limitations and seize the opportu-
nities all the more eff ectively. It is rather that such a social division of
labor provided a way of or ga niz ing cooperation that respected the
preexisting distribution of advantage. Just as this distribution of ad-
vantage favored a class or caste order, the existence of the order sup-
ported a technical division of labor marked by extreme hierarchy and
specialization.
Th e technical division of labor— the allocation of powers and re-
sponsibilities in the or ga ni za tion of work— was likely to assume, under
such circumstances, its most hierarchical and specialized form: rigid
contrasts between tasks of supervision or planning and tasks of execu-
tion, clear- cut contrasts among the jobs of execution themselves, un-
equivocal distinctions between the activities judged appropriate for
cooperation and for competition. Industrial mass production— the
production of standardized goods and ser vices, with the help of rigid
machines and production pro cesses, reliance on semiskilled labor, and
very specialized and hierarchical work relations— as it developed in the
historical period from the middle of the nineteenth century to the mid-
dle of the twentieth was at once the latest and the most extreme example
of this approach to the technical division of labor.
Th is scheme is no mere historical parable. It is a rudimentary
account of a way of or ga niz ing social relations that prevailed, in one
variant or another, in all the societies in which the religions of tran-
scendence emerged. It served to entrench both the hierarchical or ga ni-
za tion of labor and the coercive extraction of an economic surplus over
current consumption. Th is form of social or ga ni za tion exacted a high
price in return for its uses as an instrument for the accumulation of an
economic surplus as well as for the hierarchical direction of labor on a
large scale. It drastically limited the range and varieties of cooperation:
the extent to which the ways in which we or ga nize cooperative work
track the analytic and synthetic operations of practical reason. Any
such scheme required those activities to conform to a script— the two-
part script of the social and of the technical division of labor. Th e result
severely limited the potential for cooperative eff ort.
It also generated second- order problems for this approach to life.
Many attempts have been made in the history of civilization to give