138 struggling with the worldalternative regimes of private and social property within the same mar-
ket economy. Th en we can experiment more freely with ways of reconcil-
ing the contrasting aims of a market order— such as the diversifi cation of
in de pen dent sources of economic initiative and the greater or lesser
mea sure of control that each economic agent enjoys over the resources
at his disposal— according to the character of each sector of the econ-
omy. We can innovate more constantly and remorselessly in our prac-
tices of cooperation as well as in what we use them to produce.
However, no set of legal arrangements for the or ga ni za tion of the
market economy, or of anything else, is infi nitely accommodating. None
approaches the ideal limit of a natural language in which we can speak
any thought. We retain the power to imagine and introduce ways of or-
ga niz ing production that the established arrangements, and the ideas
underlying them, fail to allow. We may innovate fi rst in the institu-
tional arrangements of the market system, and promulgate only retro-
spectively the rules and the ideas rendering such innovations secure.
So it happened, for example, in the United States and in other bel-
ligerent powers, in the or ga ni za tion of the market economy. Under
pressure of a life- and- death danger, the governments of these coun-
tries cast aside arrangements to which they had seemed indissolubly
wedded and or ga nized production on a new basis. In par tic u lar, they
went beyond the boundaries of the unifi ed property right, which vests
all the component powers of property in a single right- holder, the
own er, and thus lays the basis for a crystalline distinction between pri-
vate enterprise and governmental initiative. Th ey did so, implicitly,
when they or ga nized production on the ground of freewheeling coor-
dination between government and private fi rms as well as of coopera-
tive competition among the fi rms themselves. Th ey made new law and
new ideas along the way.
Now consider an instance from the opposite extreme of human
experience: our ability to overcome the constraints of our established
methods and presuppositions in even the most rigorous, systematic,
and ambitious enterprises of the mind, among which physics and
mathematics.
If we could make only those discoveries about nature that our as-
sumptions and methods authorize, no revolution in our scientifi c ideas
would ever have taken place. Consider an example from the unsolved