Our effort to improve on the traditional dignitarian accounts rejected in earlier chapters has led us to hypothesize that the circulation of people within the routines of associational life might be interpreted as a distinctive timanthropic economy on whose well-functioning the emergence and protection of human dignity depends. It is one thing, of course, to hypothesize that the timanthropic intentionality of actual human interaction might be so conceived, and quite another to specify that hypothesis in a theoretically satisfying and realistic way for the purposes of political criticism. Chapters 12 and 13 address themselves to this task.