In his De Re Publica, Cicero writes:

“For legal equality — the object of free peoples — cannot be preserved: the people themselves, no matter how uncontrolled they may be, give great rewards to many individuals, and they pay great attention to the selection of men and honours. And what people call equality is in fact very unfair. When the same degree of honour is given to the best and the worst (and such must exist in any population), then equity itself is highly inequitable. But that is something that cannot happen in states that are ruled by the best citizens.” (1.53)

Earlier in the dialogue, Scipio mentions that

“when everything is done by the people itself, no matter how just and moderate it may be, that very equality is itself inequitable, in that it recognises no degrees of status.” (1.43)

Both statements are wholly unsurprising; they question the extent to which man ought to consider himself the equal of others. But the criteria upon which one’s position in this hierarchy, as a ‘citizen’ better than other citizens (how that is semantically possible I do not know), depends, is wholly unknowable apart from a few brief precepts as to the performance of duty, honour, and other deeds that befit the generally virtue ethics tone of Cicero’s philosophy. But even in a free state — one that Cicero readily admits Rome is, a state in ample possession of liberty (1.47) — there must be ranks of distinction because there are some people intrinsically better than other people.

In the absence of expressed criterion for hierarchy, one is left to wonder as to how a practical man such as Cicero would have expressed his preferences and organised his conception of the best regime. While his Republic and Laws are largely apologias for the Roman Republic’s glory in a moment of its deathly suffocation by the populists, there seems to be no question as to the presence of an informative and normative conception of hierarchical order that seeks to differ intrinsically from the standard (misguided) conflation of wealth with hierarchy — in 1.51 he states that “there is no uglier form of state than that in which the richest are thought to be best” — there seems to be no other determinant of how one ought to transcend economic hierarchy to achieve a hierarchy of the ‘best’ people, however it may organised.

The most recent example of a ‘best’ hierarchy, flawed and horrific as it may be, is the presence of single-party states. China, for example, is nominally democratic insofar as the internal machinations and purges of the CCP provide a mechanism for determining one’s rank in the hierarchy of Chinese socio-political life. Promotions, trials, kangaroo courts (and real ones, too) take place within the ambit of the party, which is conflated with the state itself. The state can have no separate existence outside a party which has its own dogma and rules for determination for who is best and who is not, supposedly insulated from the pressures of more mundance financial matters. But is this the right approach? I most certainly do not think so. Does this form of hierarchy — not wholly uncorrupted; the present Chinese president is the son of a former high official — represent a better alternative to a more egalitarian concern, namely that man is intrinsically equal, but the hierarchy of the polis, a necessary hierarchy, is natural insofar as it is warranted by nature but unnatural insofar as it is made necessary by social existence and man’s nature as a social being?

Furthermore, is legal equality — to be treated the same under the law — wholly incompatible with this equitable distribution of honour? I think that by maintaining a stringent legal equality the prospects for an abuse of nomocratic governance are reduced and the questions of more complex matters are differed to the wisdom of elders codified in the laws, distinct from the arbitrary and capricious whims of any single individual. This is a position I have expressed before, and I maintain to this date. Even the ruler is subject to the laws; any transgression is a slow slide to tyranny.[1] I wholly despise and reject Carl Schmitt’s unfettered, lawless wielding of executive power in ways that seem like he has certain proclivities that ensure he countenances and flirts with tyrannical, despotic government; the law is the law, sovereign and supreme. But the question of hierarchy is better dealt with in a non-legal manner: the presence of an English aristocracy, lively and essential to the English character, is evidence enough that without much ado and bearing no compromise whatsoever with the principle of legal equality, ranks of distinction and honour can and ought to be distributed to citizens of the populace for various services. For all its faults — and yes, even an Anglophile such as myself must be ready to admit the shortcomings of its faults — the Honours system is perhaps the best way of securing a constant stream of admittance into varying ranks of hierarchy, though it seems to have become much more ‘woke’ and ready to admit the vulgar going-ons of the time than one would like to see from an institution that sees itself out of time. The ruin of the honours system, and more importantly the disastrous reform of the House of Lords by Tony Blair, was the death knell for an enlightened form of governance that made English conservatism and generally English parliamentarism a superior mode of governance than, let us say, a total democracy or a society without a longstanding honours system where ranks of distinction were not common or are not recognisable by law.

[1] cf. Aristotle, Politics, V.10, 1310a39; see my exegesis and analysis here: https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/ishaanhjajodia20/files/2020/05/IJ_Kingship_Tyranny.pdf