214 religious revolution noweff ect that the struggle with the world has already had. It has estab-
lished in almost every country the idea of the divinity or of the great-
ness of the common man and woman. Where it has failed to bring
about this arousal through the infl uence of the salvation religions, it
has done so, more eff ectively and universally, through its ser vice to so-
cial reconstruction (under the labels of democracy, liberalism, and so-
cialism) as well as through its commitment to the romantic ideals of
self- expression and self- construction. Here is a real fi re in the world,
not just a doctrine written up in books.
Th e revolutionary force remains, however, far from being spent. Th e
most important eff ect of the global spread of these po liti cal doctrines
has been to establish throughout the world, and even in countries in
which the salvation religions have enjoyed little infl uence, the idea that
po liti cal arrangements should be judged by their contribution to the
empowerment of ordinary men and women: the enhancement of their
capabilities, the heightening of their experience, the broadening of the
scope of the life plans that people are able to make.
Th e infl uence of this po liti cal idea, inhibited or suppressed so long as
it lacks an institutional program adequate to its ambition, has been
strengthened by its association with the romantic conception of life as
a moral adventure. Th e premise of this conception is the infi nity of the
self. Its aim is the creation of a higher form of human life, with greater
scope, intensity, and capability. At the prompting of the worldwide
pop u lar romantic culture and under the shadow of late- romantic skep-
ticism about the possibility of love and the availability of a worthy task,
this ideal of personal experience has now become the common posses-
sion of humanity.
It makes a claim that has been neither refuted nor vindicated: unlike
our mortality, our groundlessness, and our insatiability, our suscepti-
bility to belittlement is not an ineradicable defect of human existence.
Th e readiness with which this claim is made and received, in every
country, in every class, and in every culture, is all the more remark-
able in light of its confl ict with the tenor of ordinary life. Th e experi-
ence of ordinary men and women continues overwhelmingly to be one
of drudgery and humiliation, from which only the family and the com-
munity off er refuge and only the fantasies of empowerment in the pop-
u lar culture provide escape.