316 deep freedom
redistribution so that there may be more space for individual initiative
and self- determination, free from the tutelage of the state.
Th is primitive ideological structure invites a further narrowing of
the scope of politics, presented as a synthesis. Th e aim becomes to rec-
oncile economic fl exibility with social protection.
Shallow freedom and shallow equality are freedom and equality
viewed within the restraints imposed by the prevailing institutional
settlement. Th e actual experience of po liti cal life provides an endless
series of clues to the inadequacy of this view. For example, at the end of
the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty- fi rst centuries, some of
the countries most admired as examples of social democracy experi-
mented with initiatives that came to be dubbed “fl exsecurity”: univer-
sal endowments instead of tenure in par tic u lar jobs, with the result that,
on a very small scale, it seemed possible to enjoy more fairness and more
fl exibility at the same time. No one, however, imagined that a similar
eff ort could be conducted on a much larger scale through the reforma-
tion of the institutional arrangements, including the arrangements of
property, of contract, and of relations between public power and private
initiative, that shape a market economy.
Shallow freedom and shallow equality are false options. Th ey are
based on the unwarranted ac cep tance of the existing institutional
framework: the contingent outcome of that last major institutional ref-
ormation. Th ey presuppose the validity of a simple and misleading hy-
draulic model of ideological debate: more market, less state; more state,
less market; or a combination of state and market designed to ensure
that the inequalities generated by the market are corrected by the redis-
tributive and regulatory activity of the state.
It is this simple and false scheme that is presupposed by the philoso-
phies of distributive justice exercising the greatest infl uence in these same
societies. Th e abstract and unhistorical character of these philosophies
cannot conceal their operative intent: the justifi cation of compensatory
redistribution under institutionally closed social democracy. Because
their theoretical egalitarianism is the reverse side of their institutional
emptiness or conservatism, they cannot make good on their professed
aims. Th ey argue for the humanization of a world that their adepts judge
themselves powerless to reimagine and to remake, and defi ne this hu-
manization narrowly, to suit the devices to which they are committed.