184 struggling with the worldphilosophy, we fail to affi rm without reservation the singular existence
of the universe and the inclusive reality of time. Our conventional
views about causal explanation presuppose that time is real but not too
real: real enough to ensure the existence of a world in which causal
connections diff er from logical connections (contrary to what Leibniz
and many others held) but not so real that we fi nd ourselves forced to
abandon the conception of a framework of immutable laws of nature
(rea ffi rmed by the same physical and cosmological theories that repu-
diated the notion that natural phenomena occur against an absolute
background of space and time).
We continue to represent the possible as a ghostly state of aff airs,
waiting to receive its cue to pass from the realm of the possible to the
domain of the actual. We carry this denial of radical novelty into our
view of human history. Social and historical study is dominated by ten-
dencies of thought severing the connection between insight into the
actual and imagination of the adjacent possible. A practice of thought,
characteristic of classical social theory, that represents structural dis-
continuity and innovation and history as products of a predetermined
historical script has been followed by one, associated with the contem-
porary social sciences, that remains devoid of any structural vision.
Our dominant ideas about the mind fail to recognize the confl ict be-
tween the two sides of the mind— the mind as machine and the mind as
anti- machine, delighting in its powers of recombination and transgres-
sion. Th ey fail as well to appreciate the extent to which the relative pres-
ence of these two sides of the mind is infl u e n c e d b y t h e o r g a n i z a t i o n o f
society and of the culture, with the result that the history of politics is
internal to the history of mind. In these as in many other respects, our
beliefs about ourselves resist acknowledging the relation between our
context- shaped and our context- transcending identities and powers.
Even the revaluation of the noble and the base, expressed in the
literary mixture of genres and fulfi lled in the core demo cratic idea of
the constructive genius of ordinary men and women, is swept aside by
the self- described adherents to one or another expression of the strug-
gle with the world, to make way for new hierarchies of power, advan-
tage, and value, disguised as hierarchies of merit.
Th us, the message of the struggle with the world survives supine as
well as besieged. Th e ideas and discursive practices that would make it