deep freedom 331Secure in his protection and empowered by his endowments, the
individual is able to confront instability, unafraid, and to thrive in its
midst. Such a project reveals the salvageable practical content of the
idea of fundamental rights once we expunge from it its metaphysical
and theological veneer. An experiment designed to reconcile fl exibility
and security in the or ga ni za tion of work represents no more than a
fragmentary foreshadowing of this larger vision.
Th e arrangements of contemporary market economies and repre-
sentative democracies, sequels as they are to the proto- democratic lib-
eralism and to the private- law systems of the nineteenth century, fail to
exemplify such a reconstruction. Rather, they lie in an uncertain inter-
mediate space between the contrasting limiting cases of the scriptural
caste system and of its imaginary opposite. To move in the direction
of the second limit, we need to change, step by step and piece by piece,
the institutions shaping markets, democracies, and civil societies.
A third attribute of higher cooperation is that it combine a multitude of
stimulations to novelty with a remorseless mechanism for the competi-
tive selection of the results. Prospective encouragement must give way
to retrospective judgment. Winnowing out must follow on fecundity.
Th is idea is most immediately exemplifi ed in the work of thought
and in the distinction between the logics of discovery and of justifi ca-
tion. Th e inspirations to discovery in thought are multiple and open-
ended; they obey no formula and respect no limits. To invent an idea,
however, is not to vindicate it. Having called the spirits, we wait to see
whether they will come. We subject the creatures of inspiration to the
tests that convert conjecture into justifi ed belief.
Th ese tests are normally those established in a par tic u lar discipline.
Th e more revolutionary the intellectual invention, however, the greater
becomes the chance that its ac cep tance and development will require a
change in the practice of the discipline and therefore as well in our ap-
proach to the justifi cation of ideas. Th e deeper and more fertile our intel-
lectual practice, the more does normal science take on the characteris-
tics of revolutionary science, and the more frequent the change of
method in the light of discovery is likely to be.
Our practices and regimes of cooperation become richer in their
practical eff ects and closer to the attributes of the imagination as they