Louis Dumont?s modern classic, here presented in an enlarged, revised, and corrected second edition, simultaneously offers the reader the most cogent statement on the Indian caste system and its organizing principles ? and a provocative advance in the comparison of societies on the basis of their underlying ideologies. Dumont moves gracefully from ethnographic data to the level of the hierarchical ideology rooted in ancient religious texts, which he reveals as the governing conception behind the contemporary caste structure. On yet another plane of analysis, 'homo hierarchicus' is contrasted with his modern Western antithesis, 'homo aequalis'.