deep freedom 295
the relation of the individual to other people. In each of its aspects, the
conception describes a limit or an ideal that acquires greater meaning
through the demarcation of a pathway of institutional change leading
toward it.
By the structure of society, I mean the institutional and ideological
presuppositions that shape the routine practices, confl icts, and transac-
tions in that society, and that are largely taken for granted, even to the
point of being invisible, as if they were part of the nature of things. In a
free society, this institutional and ideological framework does not pres-
ent itself as an alien fate beyond the reach of the transformative will
and imagination. It is set up in ways diminishing the distance between
the moves by which we operate within it and the moves by which we
change it. In this way, it appears to us untainted by any misleading pa-
tina of naturalness and necessity. It shows as the fl awed and revisable
collective construction that it really is.
As the structure renders itself accessible to the reach of the transfor-
mative imagination and will, it wanes in its power to shape what comes
next. Th e freer a free society becomes, the weaker the power of the dead
over the living.
In a free society, the individual has the educational equipment, as
well as the economic and po liti cal occasion, to cross the frontier be-
tween the activities that take the framework for granted and those that
bring it into question. He has been educated in a way that enables the
mind as imagination to become ascendant over the mind as machine.
He has learned to philosophize by acting, in the sense that he recog-
nizes in every project the seed of some great or small reformation. Th e
practices of society and of culture multiply opportunities for the affi r-
mation of this preeminence of the mind as imagination over the mind
as a formulaic device.
He is secure in a haven of protected vital interests and of capability-
generating endowments— above all, those of original and continuing
education— that enable him fearlessly to face innovation and instability
in the social and economic world that he inhabits. His sense of identity
and of security is not invested in the permanence of a par tic u lar form
of collective life.
He does not act or think at the behest of a social or cultural script
that assigns him a role and tells him how to perform it. He recognizes