A look at the damage abuses of power inherent with rank do to private relationships & public institutions and how to prevent it.
In his groundbreaking book Somebodies and Nobodies, Robert Fuller identified a form of domination that everyone has experienced but few dare to protest: rankism, or abuse of the power inherent in rank. Low rank—signifying weakness—marks people for abuse and discrimination in much the same way that race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation have long done. In All Rise, Fuller examines the personal, professional, and political costs of rankism and provides compelling models and strategies for realizing a post-rankist world in which everyone’s dignity is upheld.
Fuller makes the case that rankism is the chief remaining obstacle to achieving liberty and justice for all, and shows how we can root it out. He doesn’t propose that we do away with rank—without it organizations become dysfunctional—but rather argues for a “dignitarian” society in which rankism is no longer tolerated. He begins by demonstrating how rankism is rife in our social and civic institutions and then explores alternative dignitarian models for education, health care, politics, and religion.
All Rise describes an emerging “politics of dignity” that bridges the conservative-liberal divide to put the “We” back in “We the people.” It argues that democracy is a work in progress and that its next natural step is the building of a dignitarian society.
Robert W. Fuller earned his Ph.D. in physics at Princeton University and taught at Columbia, where he coauthored the classic text Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics. The mounting social unrest of the 1960s drew his attention to educational reform, and at the age of thirty-three he was appointed president of Oberlin College, his alma mater. In 1971 Fuller traveled to India as a consultant to Indira Gandhi, and there witnessed firsthand the famine resulting from the war with Pakistan over what became Bangladesh. With the election of Jimmy Carter, Fuller began a campaign to persuade the new president to end world hunger. His meeting with Carter in the Oval Office in June 1977 contributed to the establishment of the Presidential Commission on World Hunger.