320 deep freedomcause, leaving it unable to address any of the major problems of con-
temporary societies.
Deep freedom is the sole defensible po liti cal goal of progressives, of
those who have understood the po liti cal implications of the struggle with
the world and who want to rescue this orientation to existence from the
compromises and surrenders that continue to circumscribe its reach. It is
therefore, as well, a po liti cal principle of those who move in the direction
of the religion of the future. Deep freedom, in its fullest sense, is the dia-
lectic between the conception of a free society and the cumulative insti-
tutional innovations that can make this conception real.
Th ese two elements— the idea and the institutions of freedom—
develop together. Th e transformational pro cess resulting from their re-
ciprocal connection is more important and more revealing than any one
moment in the marriage of conception to arrangements. Th e conception
gains meaning by reference to actual or imagined institutional develop-
ments. Th e institutional innovations, however, are not simply the techni-
cal translation into social reality of a view in de pen dently established.
Instead, the institutional choices disclose the ambiguities and the alter-
native possible directions, concealed, at any moment, within the idea.
Th ere is no stock set of institutional arrangements that, once en-
acted, make the conception of a free society live in social reality. Th ere is
an open array of institutional enhancements, many of them rough and
fl awed functional equivalents to other such arrangements. What mat-
ters is the direction, defi ned precisely through the interaction between
the understanding and its institutional expressions.
Th e distinction between Right and Left has not lost its meaning. It
nevertheless needs to be redrawn. To confi ne it within the limits of the
contrast between shallow equality and shallow freedom is to reduce it
to a contrast between two versions of counter revolutionary thought,
both of them antagonistic to the driving po liti cal aspirations of the
struggle with the world, to be upheld and advanced by the religion of
the future.
On this account, the conservatives are those who despair of our
power to raise ourselves up, through the transformation of our arrange-
ments, to a greater life, not for a group favored by society (in the form
of hereditary economic and educational advantage) or by nature (in the
form of greater ge ne tic endowments), but for all. Th e progressives are