deep freedom 323search for arrangements lying in the zone of potential intersection be-
tween the institutional conditions for the development of the productive
capabilities of society and the institutional requirements for the overcom-
ing of domination and dependence in society. Having abandoned the
faith of the nineteenth- century liberals and socialists in an institutional
formula that would advance both these families of goods simultane-
ously, we should take care not to replace it by the equally dogmatic and
false belief in a tragic contradiction between them. We should proceed
instead on the basis of hope in identifying and developing a subset of the
institutional conditions of the fi rst good that serves the second, and a
subset of the institutional requirements of the second that advances the
fi rst. Th e long- established primacy of innovation and of capability
over the size, at any given moment, of the economic surplus preserved
over current consumption, as a constraint on economic growth, argues
powerfully in favor of the reasonableness and of the fecundity of this
hope.
Th e ideal of equality— equality of respect and of opportunity, and
greater equality of circumstance only insofar as it enhances equality of
opportunity and of respect or is required by them— is best defended
when it is subordinated to the greater and more inclusive ideal of deep
freedom. For it is this ideal that most directly touches our interest in
making ourselves more human by making ourselves more godlike. Th e
revolutionary reach of this ideal becomes clear as soon as we insist on
equipping it with its most useful instrument: the institutional reor ga-
ni za tion of society.
Th ose will be disappointed who expect from ideas about the limits to
permissible in e qual ity of circumstance, such as the six propositions
just enumerated, a metric of distributive justice. Th e institutions of so-
ciety, and the ideas predominant in its public culture, count for more
than the instantaneous reallocation that can be achieved only, when at
all, by retrospective and compensatory redistribution. Th e direction of
social and personal change matters more than the short- term arithme-
tic of redistribution. Our chance of rising to a greater life, without
abandoning some to belittlement, and of beginning our rise right now,
in a present from which we need no longer be estranged, is the standard
by which we should ultimately distinguish between the permissible and
the impermissible forms of in e qual ity.