struggling with the world 169and practices, including methods of inquiry and discourse, that lay
themselves open to revision, diminish the dependence of change on
crisis, and thereby enable us to combine the roles of insider and out-
sider. We can then participate in social and conceptual regimes while
retaining the power to challenge and revise them. We can deny them
the last word, and keep it for ourselves.
By the terms of this hope, there exists a subset of the institutional
conditions favorable to the overcoming of class oppression that also
favor the development of our practical, productive powers and a subset
of the institutional requirements of the former that is hospitable to the
latter. What makes the hope of identifying such a zone of intersection
and of advancing within it reasonable is the role that a change in rela-
tion between self and structure can play in the achievement of both our
material and our moral interests.
Once societies have escaped the extremes of poverty, the major con-
straint on economic growth ceases to be the size of the economic sur-
plus, coercively extracted by the hierarchies of class. It becomes instead
the vigor of innovation— technological, or gan i za tion al, and intellec-
tual. Th at was already the chief constraint at least since the time of the
early industrialization of Eu rope: the economic surplus in Eu rope was
no larger than in the China of the Ming- Ching dynasties or in other
agrarian- bureaucratic empires that fell back into relative backward-
ness. Innovation requires the greatest possible freedom to recombine
and transform not only the factors of production but also the ideas and
arrangements that enter into the institutional setting of production and
exchange. Th e advantages of a market economy are diminished if the
market remains fastened to a single legal- institutional version of itself.
Any entrenched system of social division and hierarchy has, as a con-
dition of its stability, that the arrangements and assumptions on which
it depends not be open to incessant challenge and disturbance. Th ey
must be insulated, in the routines of discourse as well as in the realities
of competition for wealth and power. It is precisely such an insulation
that the inarticulate orthodoxy of self and structure wants to deny to
every part of the prevailing regime of life and thought. If, however, we
fail to or ga nize an unceasing disruption of such assumptions and ar-
rangements, we allow them to restrict the forms and benefi ts of cooper-
ation and to cut the individual down to the size of his station in society.