deep freedom 311
We should desire to impose only those restraints on institutional
experimentalism that help turn the world into a concert of free peoples.
Th e less we allow access to the global public goods of po liti cal security
and economic openness to depend on obedience to a single, worldwide
institutional formula and the more vigorously divergent varieties of a
free society are established in the world, the better our chance to achieve
this goal.
A second consequence of the principle of plurality is that we should
give special weight to the ideas and to the capabilities, as well as to the
institutional arrangements, that make possible such experimentation
with the alternative institutional forms of a free society. It is not enough
to establish institutions that display, more fully than do our present
institutions, the attribute of corrigibility and that enhance our ability
to create diff erence rather than merely to remember and preserve it.
One of these future- enabling resources is an education equipping
the mind as imagination to gain the ascendant over the mind as ma-
chine. Such an education turns the school into the instrument of access
to a broader experience and vision that the established order can con-
tain. It prevents the school from serving as the tool of either the family
or the state. It recognizes in every child a tongue-tied prophet.
Our self- understanding across the whole fi eld of social and histori-
cal study, of the social sciences, of the sciences of mind and behavior,
and of the humanities, needs to supply us ideas that can inform the
imagination of alternatives. To this end, each of these disciplines must
be reformed to exemplify the connection between the understanding
of what society has been and insight into what, for better and for worse,
it can become. Legal analysis and po liti cal economy— the twin disci-
plines of the institutional imagination— must cease to serve the retro-
spective rationalization of social life and abandon the right- wing Hege-
lianism, the retrospective rationalization of the existent, that has long
been their secret philosophy.
A third consequence of the principle of plurality is that each area of
the life of a free society should be or ga nized in a way that empowers
experimental divergence in that domain. Th e capacity to innovate in
the institutional forms of a free society must be manifest in the or ga ni-
za tion of each part of the regime, according to the distinctive problems
and opportunities of each. Every area of social life should exemplify