deep freedom 335tion, is what we should desire. Th e dialectic between the experiments in
a place or in a sector and the society- wide struggle over a direction,
subject to reversal, serves as the counterpart in national politics to the
sequence of prospective stimulus and retrospective selection in eco-
nomic life. To act on this analogy is to make both production and poli-
tics more closely resemble thought.A fourth feature of higher cooperation follows from the need— and the
chance— to narrow the distance between the characteristics of experi-
mental thought and the traits of our po liti cal and productive practices.
A cooperative regime should take as its regulative ideal to become an
embodiment of the imagination in the workings of the division of la-
bor. Th e relation between the reshaping of the cooperative regime and
the work of the mind in its second, imaginative aspect may be less than
a homology. It is, however, more than a meta phor.
By recasting our cooperative practices on the model of imagination,
we serve many of our most fundamental interests. We establish a set-
ting favorable to innovation in every domain of experience. We oppose
the force and infl uence of any entrenched scheme of social division and
hierarchy, given that the power of any such scheme is the enemy of the
imagination in social life. We change, decisively, our relation to estab-
lished structures by acquiring the power to rethink and remake them
in the midst of our ordinary activities. As a result, we improve our
chances of advancing in the zone of intersection between the institu-
tional requirements of our material and our moral interests.
One way to give substance to the analogy between cooperation and
imagination proceeds in the abstract, by relating features of coopera-
tion to traits of the imagination. It works from the top down. Another
way takes its point of departure from the analysis of a historical cir-
cumstance, relating the analogy to changes that are already taking
place in our cooperative practices and arrangements. It works from the
bottom up. I now explore, in sequence, each of these ways of making
good on the eff ort to turn our cooperative practices into the social ex-
pression of our imaginative powers.
Th e imagination is the aspect of the mind that is not modular, that is
not formulaic, that exhibits a power of recursive infi nity, and that en-
joys a power of negative capability. By the power of recursive infi nity,