330 deep freedomTh e individual worker and citizen benefi ts from enhanced compensa-
tion for the eff ects of economic insecurity as well as from strengthened
economic and educational endowments. Th e protections are not job-
specifi c, nor do they take the form of tenure- like rights to the preserva-
tion of a present job. Th ey are universal, portable, and compatible with
frequent rearrangements of relations among people, machines, and
resources. Th e enhancement of his educational and economic endow-
ments, guaranteed universally by the state in de pen dently of the posses-
sion of any par tic u lar job, makes it more likely that he will be able to
thrive in the midst of the instability that results from permanent inno-
vation. In such a circumstance, cooperation will be more hospitable to
innovation than it would otherwise be. Th e confl ict between the im-
peratives of cooperation and of innovation will be moderated, over a
limited range of social life.
Th is example represents a special case of a much more general and
less familiar phenomenon. Once we grasp its range, we can begin to
identify its revolutionary implications. Both the generality and the im-
plications are most clearly exhibited in the contrasting characters and
eff ects of diff erent regimes of rights.
Th e identity, security, and economic and educational endowments of
the individual may be deeply entangled in the protection of a certain
form of life. In such a circumstance, no distinction exists between the
immunity of the individual and the defense, or even the petrifi cation,
of that social space. No such system will be secure unless it is repre-
sented in consciousness as necessary and authoritative. No such
repre sen ta tion is more aggressive in its claims than one that claims
to provide an established social arrangement with a cosmological or
theological basis. Such was the scriptural caste system in ancient India,
although we know that the historical caste system was always far more
open to variation and revision than any such repre sen ta tion would
suggest.
We can, however, imagine, in the spectrum of social possibilities,
an opposing circumstance. Th e protections and endowments of the in-
dividual are so designed that they leave society maximally open to
transformation. Something is taken out of the terrain of open
experimentation— the rules defi ning the protections and the endowments
of individuals— the better to open up more of the rest of social life.