414 becoming more human by becoming more godliketoward the diff usion of prophetic powers within the mass of ordinary
men and women.
A third axis is change in the quality as well as in the content of our
institutional arrangements in the direction suggested by the preceding
remarks about putting repetition in its place. Th e most important site
of such change is the reor ga ni za tion of demo cratic politics: the cre-
ation of a high- energy democracy that dissociates the fragmentation
of power (the liberal principle) from the slowing down of politics (the
conservative principle); increases the level of or ga nized pop u lar en-
gagement in public life; overcomes impasse among branches or powers
of government quickly; and favors the creation, in par tic u lar parts of
a country or parts of a society, of counter models of the future. Th e
institutional arrangements of democracy enjoy a natural priority over
other exercises of institutional change because they help set the terms
on which we can change all other arrangements.
Th e heating up of demo cratic politics and the quickening of its pace
help make the social order conform to our idea of demo cratic politics,
as a variety of collective activity in which people are divided and united
by opinion as well as by interest, through countless mechanisms of an-
tagonism and union, rather than standing in the shadow of an over-
weening scheme of social division and hierarchy. What demo cratic
politics is supposed to be, society would become. For such a change to
take place, however, demo cratic politics would have to become some-
thing diff erent from what it now is. We would know that we had ad-
vanced toward our goal when the life chances of individuals ceased to
be shaped by the transmission of educational and economic advantage
through the family; the institutional or ga ni za tion of society turned
into a central and per sis tent topic of ordinary politics; and innovation
in the established structures of society and of thought became less de-
pendent on crisis than it continues to be.
Th e principle informing such a direction of change in our po liti cal
institutions and practices has implications as well for the or ga ni za tion
of the economy and of civil society. For the economy, it means that the
market should not remain fastened to a single, exclusive legal and insti-
tutional version of itself. Th e decentralized allocation of capital should
be arranged through alternative regimes of private and social property,
allowed to coexist within the same market economy.