294 deep freedomon which to develop our individual and collective powers. Its mistake
was not simply to have chosen one institutional formula rather than
another; it was above all to have committed itself dogmatically to any
such formula. Moreover, the ideal of individual empowerment to which
this institutional formula was wedded remained too closely modeled
on a narrow aristocratic ideal of self- possession to serve us as a guide to
achievement of a greater life.
Nevertheless, this classical liberal marriage of an ideal of empower-
ment with a program for institutional reconstruction represents a bet-
ter model of what we need now than what has followed it in the history
of po liti cal thought. It has been largely succeeded by a series of philo-
sophical props to institutionally conservative social democracy. Th ese
props suff er from lack of institutional vision of any kind, other than the
unacknowledged ac cep tance of the social- democratic settlement of the
mid- twentieth century as the unsurpassable horizon of our transforma-
tive projects. Th eir commanding impulse is the speculative justifi cation
of what later in this chapter I call shallow equality: greater equality of
circumstance to be achieved, in the absence of institutional reconstruc-
tion, by compensatory redistribution.
A simple way to describe the task of developing the conception of a free
society is to say that it seeks to go on from where the classical liberals and
socialists left off. Th e aim must be to reject their institutional dogmatism
and to revise, in the light of the subsequent history of thought and of soci-
ety, our hopes for the future. In so doing, we teach ourselves to hope for
more, rather than for less, as we have been persuaded to do by those who
have lent the prestige of philosophy to the interruption and containment
of the struggle with the world. Such an eff ort retakes with redoubled force
the determination of the liberals and socialists of the nineteenth century
to marry the vision of a greater life (to which they subordinated the quest
for greater equality of circumstance) and the commitment to change, for
the sake of that vision, the institutional structure of society.
Th e following outline of the conception of a free society should be
read in the context of my subsequent defense of a direction of institu-
tional change.
Consider fi rst the conception of a free society by the light of its implica-
tions for the relation of the self to the structure of society, and then for