struggling with the world 183market economy by a state- directed economic order. In non- state so-
cialism, it was the proposal of cooperative initiatives, credited with the
potential defi nitively to abolish economic oppression.
If the political— liberal or socialist— branch of the struggle with the
world clung to an institutional formula, the romantic branch repudi-
ated all institutions as death to the spirit. Between the institutional fe-
tishists and the romantic prophets, no room was left for a transforma-
tive project capable of dispensing with defi nitive institutional formulas
without abandoning the attempt to reshape society.
Th e resigned social demo crats of today exemplify such a reduction
of the message of the struggle with the world. Th ey reduce it by accept-
ing the social- democratic settlement of the mid- twentieth century as
the horizon within which to pursue the interests that they recognize
and the ideals that they profess. Programmatic debate narrows to the
attempt to reconcile American- style economic fl exibility with European-
style social protection.
Insofar as the message of the sacred or profane versions of the strug-
gle with the world fails to be reduced in doctrine, it is nevertheless mas-
sively violated in practice. It coexists, unresistingly, with beliefs, insti-
tutions, and practices that contradict its central vision. Its theologians
and ideologists refuse, for the most part, to recognize any such contra-
diction. Th ey temporize with beliefs that muffl e the contradiction be-
tween vision and practice. Th ey accommodate to forms of thought and
of life that contradict the deepest and most distinctive impulses of this
approach to existence.
Th e result is that in its real historical life the struggle with the world
has existed almost exclusively in such compromised forms. Its visible
expressions are the or ga nized varieties of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam, and the conventional secular humanism, with its complacent
moral and po liti cal pieties. We now know no other variant of the strug-
gle with the world. Th e development of an alternative, taking the mes-
sage of the struggle with the world, in either sacred or profane voice, to
its last consequences would, more than ever, amount to a revolutionary
event. It would change, at a single stroke, both our understanding of the
message and our experience of ourselves.
Consider fi rst the range of widely accepted beliefs incompatible with
the core vision informing this approach to life. In science and natural