326 deep freedomthe form of cooperation. Th e more closely the two sets of experiments
are connected, the more each becomes an incitement for the other, the
greater the success in attenuating the tension between the need to co-
operate and the need to innovate, designing the cooperative arrange-
ments most hospitable to permanent innovation both about nature and
about cooperation itself and providing opportunity and material and
conceptual equipment to the largest number of people, the more rap-
idly do the productive capabilities of society develop.
At each turn in this history, however, two forces contend. On the one
hand, there is the functional advantage provided by greater facility to
innovate with respect to both nature and cooperation itself. On the
other hand, there is the pressure to do so in ways that least disturb the
predominant interests and beliefs. Th is mitigated disturbance is what
we might describe, in each historical circumstance, as the path of least
re sis tance. For example, the present confi nement of the practices of the
new economy to relatively isolated advanced sectors has been the path
of least re sis tance for the development of the emerging style of produc-
tion. Th e work of transformative thought and politics is to create alter-
natives to the path of least re sis tance.
Th e functional advantage can always be realized in more than one
way. Its achievement, in addition to being regularly (but not necessar-
ily) reduced to the path of least re sis tance, is achieved with the institu-
tional and intellectual materials that happen to lie at hand, generated
by many loosely related sequences of past change and compromise.
Th ere is no preset menu of institutional options, much less a predeter-
mined succession of indivisible institutional systems, driven forward
by laws of historical change, as much classical Eu ro pe an social theory
supposed.
Some countries have prospered through the circumstantial deploy-
ment of radically diff erent sets of institutional arrangements. For ex-
ample, the United States, whose public culture suff ers from the tempta-
tion to exempt its institutional arrangements from the reach of the
experimentalist impulse that is otherwise so vigorous in its life, never-
theless cast aside a fetishistic view of the market economy, during the
Second World War of the twentieth century, and managed production
as well as war on principles opposed to its prevailing public ideology.
Other countries have tried many alternative ways of or ga niz ing the