Seven Oaks Magazine.

All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity, by Robert W. Fuller. (2006, Berrett-Koehler, 178 pp, $US22.95, hardcover).

Robert Fuller was a mere 33 years of age when he found himself president of his alma mater, Oberlin College in Ohio. Insecure at first, he soon realized his colleagues only qualifications for their top posts were ones he shared – they were all white men well over six feet tall. From the top of his local hierarchy, Fuller began what would become a life-long study of the systemic abuses of power that he would come to call “rankism.”

Decades later, Fuller found himself on the outside of power looking in, trying to find a publisher for his treatise on society’s ever-present indignities but finding his theory of rankism dismissed as “just another ism”. Somebodies and Nobodies finally landed somebody to publish it in the form of the Gabriola Island based New Society Publishers. Soon Oprah Magazine and the New York Times were paying attention, and since then Fuller has been on the lecture circuit pretty much full time, giving over 300 speeches outlining the need he perceives for something of a new civil rights movement to build what he calls a “dignitarian society”.

With All Rise, Fuller’s new book, the author outlines his now mature vision for the reform of U.S. society, and for the elimination of rankism in general. The problem, Fuller emphasizes, is the abuse of rank, not the idea of rank itself, and he explicitly distinguishes his proposals from what he defines as previous “utopian egalitarian” models for change. This dichotomy between Fuller’s definition of egalitarian and dignitarian would seem to be a dismissal of the “s word”, socialism, which is as absent from this book as it is from contemporary U.S. society.

What emerges instead is a part psychological, part sociological critique of power and a wide-ranging (if somewhat limited in the structural changes it envisions) proposal – including a number of social democratic reforms -- for remedying what ails a non-egalitarian, non-dignitarian society like the United States.

Fuller laments what he sees as nearly three decades of retreat from dignitarian principles in the U.S., citing Reagan’s election as the beginning of a real conservative rollback. He is full of ideas for pushing back in a progressive direction, outlining principles such as universal health care, quality accessible education, workplace and university reform, and a less aggressive foreign policy, among others. It is hard to envision these changes being pushed through in the absence of any significant working class movement in the United States, though it must be said that this year’s emergence of the “new civil rights movement” around immigrant rights is a critical development in the fight for dignity and equality for all.

Robert Fuller was precocious in his rise to the top of academia, but nevertheless chose other more creative pursuits, even when that landed him temporarily back in what he describes as “nobodyland”. For many who reach lofty career heights early in life, coasting and corruption are not far behind. Fuller has taken a different course indeed, exhibiting a relentless intellectually inquiry and the pursuit of a better, more dignified world.