298 deep freedomand meaning. We should not regard the institutional work as if it were
simply the translation of ideas and goals into a design: an instrumental
social engineering. It is by virtue of such work that we develop our
ideas about the future of society, including the ideas summarized in
this conception of free society. It is by confronting the choices between
alternative ways to realize, in institutional form, our recognized inter-
ests and professed ideals that we uncover the ambiguities in our com-
mitments and defi ne what we really want.
Th ere is no unique justifi cation of the conception of a free society,
and no method by which we can pretend to infer its content from sup-
posedly weaker premises, having smuggled that content into these
premises in the fi rst place. Th e idea of a free society can be justifi ed
from the bottom up and from the top down.
From the bottom up, its justifi cation lies in the power of the prac-
tices and institutions that it informs both to realize and to change our
present understanding of our interests and ideals. It is justifi ed to the
extent that it changes our understanding of our ideals and interests in
ways that give them more of a future and that place them in more di-
rect communion with our most powerful aspirations and anxieties.
From the top down, the basis of the conception of a free society is the
revolutionary orthodoxy of the struggle with the world. We come to
such a conception when we are converted to the beliefs about who we
are that this approach to the world proposes, recognize that these be-
liefs have implications for the reordering of social life, and rebel against
the compromises and equivocations that now circumscribe their enact-
ment and hollow out their meaning. Th e adherent to such a conception
is a person for whom the prevailing, inherited forms of these beliefs are
not enough: not enough to keep the message of this approach to exis-
tence alive by making it live in our actual experience of social life.
Th e religion of the future turns this attitude into a comprehensive
view of our identity and vocation. In so doing so, it lends further support
to the conception of a free society that I have just outlined. Th e value of
this support is, however, qualifi ed by the ineradicable contestability of
any such comprehensive view.
It has been a continuing theme of this book that our commitment
to any approach to the problems of existence (the overcoming of the
world, the humanization of the world, and the struggle with the world