In identifying non-modern societies as those which fuse fact and

value and modern ones as those which separate the two (below, Chapter 3), Dumont was clearly following this
Durkheimian trend.
Dumont’s dichotomy differs, however, in that it is ultimately resolved
as another hierarchical opposition, because even modern societies,
though thinking of themselves as egalitarian, are ultimately compelled
to recognize the hierarchies that are inevitably contained within them
(see further Chapter 5, below). This is partly because modern societies
are themselves not entirely free from all manifestations of non-modern
thought. This is also one respect in which Dumont recognizes the
empirical as distinct from, though valued less than, the ideological.
What Dumont and earlier writers call modern thought is essentially
the thought of science and of similarly analytical, critical and intellectual environments and situations. The idea
that modern humans
uniformly and consistently think rationally and logically is at root a
fiction. It is also true that no more than actors in non-modern societies
do they always identify the contradictions in modern life but instead
find ways of accommodating them. Given that this is so and that such
contradictions are resolvable precisely through hierarchical oppositions, the latter are bound to figure in modern
societies as well as nonmodern ones.
Though developed in reaction to Hertz’s influential article of 1909,
the notion of hierarchical opposition is nonetheless traceable historically to it, and as we shall see (below,
Chapter 6), even discernible in it.
It is to this key text that we now turn.