deep freedom 297tional arrangements that has the best chance of mobilizing and develop-
ing everyone’s talents. Such a structure does not sacrifi ce these lasting
moral and material interests to any short- term advantage of entrenched
in e qual ity, whether represented in the language of economic incentives
or in the language of coercive extraction (on the basis of in e qual ity) of
an economic surplus. In developing arrangements of this kind, we af-
fi rm our determination to seize on the kinship between our material
interest in the plasticity of social arrangements and our moral interest in
the overcoming of belittlement, by the many as well as by the few.
In its view of the relation between the individual and other people,
the conception of a free society requires that the individual not be sub-
ject to any form of coercion by others, either directly at the hands of
individuals or indirectly at the hands of a state acting as their instru-
ment. (A single- minded focus on oppression by the state, in contrast to
many other forms of belittlement, has been a hallmark of many concep-
tions of a free society.) A free man or a woman is not to be coerced mate-
rially or spiritually. His or her humanity- defi ning attribute of transcen-
dence is to be respected and encouraged at every turn.
In a free society, eco nom ical ly dependent wage work is understood
(as the liberals and socialists of the nineteenth century saw it) as the
temporary and defective compromise that it is. It gives way, increas-
ingly, to self- employment and cooperation, separately or combined, as
the superior forms of free labor. As soon as the relative wealth and tech-
nological and scientifi c advance of society permit, no person is required
to do the repetitious work that is properly consigned to machines. We
use machines, in such a society, to do everything that we have learned
how to repeat, so that the whole time of our lives can be reserved for the
not yet repeatable.
Cooperation in a free society requires neither sameness nor inclu-
sive agreement. It is energized by diff erence and disagreement. Diff er-
ences are less the problem than they are the solution, because they
generate the material on which the selective mechanisms of economic
competition and or ga nized po liti cal rivalry can operate. Th e diff er-
ences that we create matter more than the ones we inherit and remem-
ber; prophecy counts for more than memory.
It is only through its extension into real or imagined institutional
experiments that the conception of a free society gains detailed content