242 religious revolution nowbroader range of experience than present society and culture make
available.
In the second place, with regard to its scope, this practice requires
the combination of the personal with the po liti cal. Its concern must
include the reshaping of society and its institutions as well as the re-
orientation of the self and its habits. No obvious agent, however, exists
to coordinate transformative action over so wide a range. Po liti cal par-
ties arose in the history of the last few centuries to undertake the
struggle for power in the name of par tic u lar convergences of interest
and of opinion. More or less or ga nized movements in civil society, in-
cluding traditional churches, shape opinion about personal morality.
But who or what is the agent capable of orchestrating changes in
both these realms and of directing them to a common goal? Such an
agent does not exist, and if it did exist, it would enjoy a power subver-
sive of religious as well as of po liti cal freedom. Th e movements of reli-
gious enthusiasm in the nineteenth- century United States, with their
open- ended implications for society as well as for the self, are historical
examples of such a crossing of boundaries between the personal and
the po liti cal. A convergence of overlapping movements must replace
the individual prophet and teacher.
Ideas are required to inform such movements. However, they are
unlikely to be the ideas of any one thinker and teacher. Th eir develop-
ment will depend on the transformation of the disciplines into which
knowledge is now or ga nized; it cannot simply fl oat above these disci-
plines as speculative thought. If it is to propose a direction for the reor-
ga ni za tion of society as well as for the re orientation of personal con-
duct, it must be able to rely on the instruments of the institutional
imagination, in the form of a revised practice of legal analysis and of
po liti cal economy.
If it is to hold up the image of a changed form of personal experience
and of connection with others, it must face the hard truths about our
ambivalence to others and our self- division that post- romantic litera-
ture and art have explored. It must not allow itself to oscillate, as the
academic moral phi los o phers do, between methodological disputes
empty of tangible content and moral casuistry bereft of transformative
vision. It must suggest a direction for life that is in conformity to its
program: faithful to its vision of the possibility of an existence greater