168 struggling with the worldOur transformative power, however, is not limited to marginal revi-
sions of social and conceptual systems that we are generally inclined to
leave unchallenged and unchanged. We also possess the ability cumu-
latively to change their openness to our regime- resisting and regime-
revising freedom. In this way, we can affi rm in practice the made- up
character of the social and conceptual worlds in which we act and
think.
Th at this orthodoxy has at best been only half- articulated and that
its implications for the reconstruction of thought and society have been
misunderstood are characteristic of the struggle with the world. Its
teaching is so revolutionar y and so remote from the currents of thought
that have prevailed in the world history of philosophy and theology
that we grasp and develop this message only fi tfully, by halting steps.
An example, in the domain of our po liti cal beliefs, illustrates the
practical signifi cance of this half- secret and largely undeveloped ortho-
doxy about spirit and structure. Th e liberals and socialists of the nine-
teenth century, including John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, mistakenly
believed that the institutional conditions for the development of our
practical capabilities converge with the institutional conditions for the
freeing of ordinary men and women from the injustices and humilia-
tions of class society. Th ey disagreed in their demarcation of the path of
institutional advance. However, they agreed in accepting the idea of a
pre- established harmony between the institutional requirements for
the achievement of these two families of goods.
Our defi ciency in the imagination of institutional alternatives tempts
us to embrace the opposite dogma: that a contradiction exists between
the requirements of economic growth— or, more generally, of the de-
velopment of our practical capabilities— and the conditions for our
liberation from the restraints of class society. Th is dogma, however,
would be no more justifi ed in its empirical assumptions, and may be
even more damaging in its practical consequences, than the dogma of
pre- established harmony.
Th e suppressed orthodoxy about self and structure gives reasons for
acting upon a hope untainted by that dogma: the hope of advance in a
zone of potential intersection between our material and our moral in-
terests. Th e basis for this hope lies in the relation of a third set of inter-
ests to those other two: our interest in the development of institutions