Perhaps there was never any other hierarchy that ruled so unconditionally and that possessed such fantastic prerogatives as this one. But consider the life of the Brahman, this man who was endowed with unsurpassed power, against whose word there was absolutely no appeal, who seemed to be the only man with rights in the entire people such that even the king was no more than a subordinate of the priest. One sees there a life of unbearable harshness, of such constriction by forms and rules and mortifications and limitations that there would probably have been extraordinarily few Europeans who would have wanted even the unsurpassed rights of the Brahman priest at such a price. He was the most powerful, but also the most unfree man in India.

XREF: Parallel to the paradox of the king as subordinate to the priest — power and constraint intertwined, echoing Weber's analysis of hierocratic authority.

XREF: Contrasts with Western assumptions that power and freedom go together; echoes Weber's ideas about the iron cage of rationality within religious hierarchies.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 494