struggling with the world 131lished in such a way that they deny to their participants ready access to
the means and occasions by which to challenge and change them.
Th ey may lengthen the distance between the ordinary moves we make
within an institutional or ideological order that we take for granted
and the extraordinary moves by which, typically at the provocation of
crisis, we come to challenge and change pieces of this order. In such a
setting, belief in the sanctity, the authority, or the necessity of the es-
tablished order may represent a self- fulfi lling prophecy. Th anks to this
prophecy, the present arrangements begin to seem the only way to
enact the interests recognized, and the ideals professed, by those who
live under its rules.
Th e more an institutional and ideological regime in society, or a
conceptual regime in thought, exhibits such traits, the more it appears
to be a thing, or an alien and irresistible fate, rather than the contingent
and revisable collective construction that it is. Even, however, at the ex-
treme limit of this tendency, the entrenched order will never be so en-
trenched that it can ensure itself against the power of those who inhabit
it to resist and to change it. It will never be able completely to reduce
them to the condition of hapless puppets. As soon as unforeseen cir-
cumstances shake the stability of the order, the ambivalence of people’s
attitude to it becomes manifest: those who seemed to be unresisting in-
struments of the regime of life or of thought now show the face of apos-
tasy and subversion.
We can, however, so reor ga nize the arrangements of society and
culture that they supply the instruments, and multiply the occasions,
for their own remaking. We can diminish the distance between our
context- preserving and our context- changing moves so that transfor-
mation arises more continuously out of the normal business of every-
day life and change becomes less dependent on crisis as its enabling
condition.
Th anks to such shift s in the or ga ni za tion of society and of culture,
history becomes, in actuality, not just in principle, more open to our
transformative action. Th e result adds substance and luster to our as-
cent. It makes us freer and bigger. It increases our share in some of the
attributes that believers in the salvation religions ascribe to God.
We can carry the same campaign over to the realm of ideas and discur-
sive practices. In that realm, it results in the loosening of the restraints