310 deep freedom
permanent feature both of the truth about politics and of the truth
about freedom. Th is principle of plurality is the second principle in-
forming the conception and design of a free society. It complements the
fi rst principle, of the protection of apostasy.
Th ree consequences follow from the principle of plurality.
A fi rst consequence of the principle of plurality is that the or ga ni za-
tion of the world should be hospitable to collective experimentation
with the alternative forms of a free society. It should not make the ar-
rangements for security or for trade depend upon submission to a par-
tic u lar institutional formula. It should be marked by an institutional
minimalism rather than by an institutional maximalism: the greatest
economic and cultural engagement of peoples with one another, on the
basis of the least restraint on their domestic institutional experiments.
Arrangements for world trade, for example, should not prevent ex-
periments in the reshaping of a market economy, including those that
associate government with private fi rms or that innovate in the basic
rules of property and contract in the eff ort to or ga nize multiple ways to
decentralize economic initiative and or ga nize access to the resources
and opportunities of production.
However, a distinction must be drawn between institutional experi-
ments that plausibly represent alternative forms of a free society and
those that suppress freedom. Apostasy from the ideals of a free society
is sacrosanct within any free state. Its sanctity does not imply a require-
ment for tolerance of the regimes that deny to both individuals and
peoples the po liti cal, economic, and cultural means with which to pass
judgment on the structure in which they fi nd themselves.
Such regimes dishonor the core attributes of humanity. Th ey also
seek to entrench themselves, in the name of distinct vision, against any
test of the claims on which they are based, other than the test of eco-
nomic ruin and military defeat. Th e reasons not to intervene in them in
a given circumstance are merely practical. Th ey may nevertheless be
overwhelming. In a world in which the great powers are unable to dis-
tinguish their interests from the interests of humanity or the concep-
tion of a free society from the fl awed institutional arrangements that
they embrace, and that they oft en seek to impose on the rest of man-
kind, intervention in the name of freedom may simply serve the hege-
mony of a great power.