deep freedom 315was to the empowerment of both the individual and the species: the
formation of a greater humanity and of a greater self. Th ey diff ered in
their understanding of this greatness as well as in the institutional
formulas on which, mistakenly, they pinned their hopes. Th ey under-
stood that no sane man or woman who could have a greater life would
settle instead for a rigid equality of outcome or circumstance. Th ey
regarded abolition of the injustices of class society and of eco nom-
ical ly dependent wage labor as an important part of the fi ght for a
larger freedom. Th ey would never have accepted the notion that we
can redress the greatest evils of social life by compensatory and retro-
spective redistribution of income through money transfers or social-
entitlement programs or ga nized by the state. In professing these be-
liefs, they were revolutionaries, as we should be today and tomorrow,
opposing the established regime and prophesying a greater life for
mankind.
Th ose who take the priority of equality over freedom to be the key-
note of the progressive cause make an unacknowledged and decisive
assumption: they accept the established institutional settlement. If they
live in the rich North Atlantic countries, the settlement that they chiefl y
accept is the social- democratic compromise of the mid- twentieth cen-
tury (with its New Deal counterpart in the United States). If they fi nd
themselves in another part of the world, they are nevertheless likely to
see that compromise as the horizon and limit of our demo cratic hopes.
Th e progressives or the left ists then become those who, within the
limits of the social- democratic settlement, want more equality. What
that must largely mean, given respect for the established institutional
arrangements, is aft er- the- fact redistribution and regulation rather
than any reshaping of either production or politics. By the terms of that
bargain, any attempt fundamentally to alter the productive and the po-
liti cal arrangements was abandoned. Th e state was allowed to gain wide-
ranging powers to regulate, to redistribute, and to manage the economy
counter- cyclically.
Th e conservatives are, according to the same way of thinking, those
who want to shift the weight of that historical compromise in the direc-
tion of freedom and effi ciency. For them, freedom is greater room for
maneuver within the terms set by the established forms of the market
economy and of constitutional democracy: less regulation and less