334 deep freedomcan be enhanced by other arrangements that prevent or overcome im-
passe between the po liti cal branches of governments and engage the
people in a continuing conversation about the alternative futures of
their country.
Th e counterpart in demo cratic politics to competitive selection in
the economy is thus the provisional and reversible choice of a direction
for a country or a group of countries. Th e master instrument of this
deliberation is the state.
Th e state matters for two reasons: one tragic, the other hopeful. Th e
tragic reason is the need for the po liti cal protection of distinct forms of
life, from which there results the danger of war. Th is danger is miti-
gated but not avoided by a world order disassociating the goods of po-
liti cal security and economic openness from any requirement to con-
vergence toward similar institutional arrangements.
Th e hopeful reason is that a commitment to or ga nize cooperation
on the basis of deep freedom has no single and self- evident institu-
tional expression. It lacks such determinate expression not because it is
empty of content but rather because it is full of alternative defensible
and promising content. We can never infer from an ideal of free coop-
eration the institutions of any par tic u lar cooperative regime. A state is
needed not only to protect a distinctive form of life but also to defi ne in
law the scope of a chosen content and of a national direction. Such a
choice will be blind unless it is informed by a wealth of experimental
variation.
For national politics to serve as the site of such decisive choices, the
constitutional arrangements of government must be such that the lib-
eral principle of the fragmentation of power in the state not be con-
fused with the conservative principle of the slowing down of politics:
the deliberate inhibition on the po liti cal transformation of society that
results, for example, from Madison’s scheme of checks and balances in
the American presidential regime. Th e liberal principle should be reaf-
fi rmed even as the conservative one is repudiated. A multiplicity of
sources of initiative and of power should not result, by design, in a di-
vided government, incapable of decisive action.
A power for decisive action, informed by a vast range of experimen-
tal variation within government, the economy, and civil society but
subject at every turn to challenges that can result in a change of direc-