struggling with the world 165tion of diff erent domains of social life: government and its citizens;
fi rms and workers; fi nance and production; the family and the state.
Each set of arrangements, enacted in a par tic u lar area of social life,
translated the abstract idea of society into a prescriptive image of
human association— of what relations among people can and should
be like in that part of society. Each stopped history in a par tic u lar
place.
Th e Hegelian heresy does not appear most oft en in the straightfor-
ward version in which it was expounded by the phi los o pher. It appears
insidiously in countless veiled forms, all the more eff ective for being
disguised. Today it has, as one of its expressions, the idea that eco-
nomic, po liti cal, and social pluralism— a market economy, a represen-
tative democracy, and a free civil society— has an established and lim-
ited range of institutional expressions, the very ones established in the
rich North Atlantic democracies.
Th e heresy would not be as infl uential as it is had it not become the
premise of the dominant practices of thought across the entire fi eld of
social historical studies. Th e hard social sciences, beginning with eco-
nomics, explain the present institutional arrangements, including the
forms of the market economy, by vindicating their naturalness, neces-
sity, or superiority. Th e normative disciplines of po liti cal philosophy
and legal theory take as their endeavor to theorize practices, such as
compensatory redistribution by tax and transfer or the improving ide-
alization of law in the vocabulary of impersonal policy and principle,
that claim to humanize the established structure rather than to rei-
magine or remake it. Th e humanities surrender to subjectivist adven-
turism and to the private sublime.
Th e opposing error to which the view of self and structure has been
repeatedly subject in the history of this orientation to the world is the
Sartrean heresy. Th e teaching of the Sartrean heresy is that we affi rm
our humanity only by defying and disturbing the or ga nized arrange-
ments of society and, more generally, the reign of routine and repeti-
tion in life and in thought. Structure, according to the view, robs spirit
of life. Th e instances of our re sis tance to such robbery are the tropes of
the romantic imagination: the crowd in the streets against the bu-
reaucratic arrangements of the state, romantic love against the rou-
tines of married life, the unformed against the formed. Spirit— if by