deep freedom 337feature of cooperation in a free society— that our ways of cooperating
with one another not be circumscribed by a preexisting plan of social
hierarchy and division.
Th at a practice of cooperation enjoys, in conformity to the model of
the imagination, a power of recursive infi nity means that it confi rms its
advantage by the fertility of the combinations and innovations that it
makes possible. It can operate successfully over a broad range of cir-
cumstances. In those circumstances, it can innovate more frequently
and more radically. Many such innovations will begin in the recombi-
nation of elements that are already familiar, or in their analogical ex-
tension, moving from the more familiar to the less familiar.
Th at a practice of cooperation exhibits, as does the imagination, a
power of negative capability means that it proves itself as the collective
device by which we can do more than the established order of society
and culture appears to accommodate or than the existing circumstances
seem to make possible. Defying any formula, it turns transgression to
advantage.
A practice of cooperation marked by these traits of the imagination
is more likely to fl ourish in a society that has already moved far in the
direction of the ideal of a structure of no structure. Instead of being the
consequence of such institutional arrangements, it can serve as their
forerunner.
Th e attempt to reshape a cooperative regime on the model of the
imagination may seem to provide only the most general and remote
guidance in our eff orts at institutional reconstruction. Yet it has a wealth
of implications for the ordering of practical social life. To understand
these implications, consider what such an attempt must reject in the or-
ga ni za tion of economic and po liti cal life.
First, it must oppose any way of or ga niz ing a market economy that
fastens the market to a single dogmatic version of itself, even if that ver-
sion is falsely represented as the institutional crystallization of sponta-
neous economic order. Such a freezing of the arrangements for exchange
and production confl icts with the nature of the imagination, which
proceeds by distancing itself from the phenomenon and by subsuming
it, once distanced, under a range of transformation.
Second, for the same reason, it must rebel against any form of po liti cal
life that by lowering the temperature of politics (the level of or ga nized