304 deep freedomTh e law is the institutionalized form of the life of a people, understood
and elaborated by reference to the understandings of the ideals and of
the interests that make sense of it. If the rejection of the ideal of the
neutrality were not to be accompanied by the safeguards to apostasy,
those would be right who fear that the failure of neutrality would un-
dermine freedom.
Th e second reason to ensure the prerogative of apostasy is to guaran-
tee that the regime can be corrected. Only the internal enemies of the
established order can guarantee its corrigibility, for it is they, and they
alone, who can subject it to radical, not just superfi cial, opposition.
Corrigibility is not a minor attribute of the regime; it is one of its
most important features. Its centrality results from awareness of the
defi cient and ephemeral character of every institutional design. Th e pro-
tection of apostasy is thus closely linked with the integrity of a free soci-
ety: its continuing power to renew itself, the better to create the new.
Th e third reason to shield the prerogative of apostasy has to do with
the relation that, under the guidance of the religion of the future, we
should desire to have with the institutional order of our society. Th is
third reason combines the view of the self, underlying the fi rst reason,
and the value placed on the corrigibility of institutions, crucial to the
second reason.
We must reject the Hegelian heresy, with its attempt to treat a par tic-
u lar institutional scheme as the defi nitive home of embodied spirit and
as the consummation of history. Th e apparent alternative to this mis-
take then becomes to treat all regimes as so many historical provincial-
isms. We must, according to such a view, choose one of these provin-
cialisms and improve it by what ever standards our experience and our
educat ion ma ke ava i lable to us. We ca nnot hope cu mu lat ively to cha nge
the relation between the self and the institutional or conceptual struc-
tures that it inhabits.
If, however, we can transform the character as well as the content of
such orderings of social life, seeing them for the revisable collective
constructions that they are and rendering them open to challenge and
revision in the midst of our ordinary business, then the prerogative of
apostasy from the principles of the regime becomes sacrosanct. For it is
only by the per sis tence of confl ict and controversy over the fundamen-
tals of the regime that we are able to keep forcefully before us the para-