The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c5.39

c5.39

Here the traditional inner conflict presented itself in a new form. Briefly, the problem was—and is—that modernity operates on the assumption, or rather the fiction, that society consists of an arbitrary collection of isolated individuals, while the unity of the whole is not realized through immediate relations of hierarchical interdependence but mediated by abstract, impersonal rules and principles. This, as we saw, is not new. What is new is the resource base that makes it possible to give the idea a substantial degree of reality. In order to achieve this degree of reality, modernity requires an impersonal, “horizontal” pattern of distribution, which emancipates the individual from the personal bonds of “vertical,” hierarchic interdependence characterizing the “little kingdom.”