338 deep freedompop u lar engagement in po liti cal life) and by slowing down its pace (par-
ticularly through the designed perpetuation of deadlock between the
po liti cal branches of government) inhibits the po liti cal transformation of
society. Th e low- energy democracies of today cannot serve as po liti cal
embodiments of the imagination. One of the marks of the imagination is
to do the work of crisis without crisis. Another is to diminish the tro-
pisms of perception and insight. Th e existing democracies, however,
continue to make of crisis the indispensable condition of change and to
renew the power of the past over the future. Th ey do so by their failure to
develop a form of po liti cal life capable of bringing the established struc-
ture of society within the grasp of the transformative will.
Th ird, it must not accept a world po liti cal and economic order that is
hostile to the experiments and heresies on which the development of
such economic and po liti cal alternatives depends. Th at order takes in
vain the name of po liti cal and economic freedom to impose on the whole
world conformity to a restrictive institutional blueprint as a requirement
of access to the global public goods of po liti cal security and economic
openness. It seeks to give things and money freedom to roam the world,
while leaving people imprisoned in the nation- state and inhibited from
building, through their perpetual movement, both the unity and di-
versity of mankind. Such an order amounts to a conspiracy of the
great powers against the place of imagination in the world. Th e success
of this conspiracy depends on lack of imagination as much as it de-
pends on interest and fear.
Fourth, it must not allow the forces that can most threaten this
structure— the visionary and prophetic forces that lie dormant in reli-
gion and in high and pop u lar culture— to be privatized and cut off from
the public conversation of the democracy. Th e result of this privatiza-
tion of the sublime, reversed only by catastrophe, is to produce a public
discourse that is incapable of subsuming the existent under a range of
alternative possibilities, as the work of the imagination requires. It is an
eff ect reinforced by the methods and ideas of the prevailing practices of
social and historical study, which sever the link between insight into
what exists and imagination of the accessible alternatives.
Fift h, it must insist that no man or woman be forced, in order to
work and to earn a living, to do the repetitious work that can be under-
taken by a machine. A machine is a contraption ruled by a formula de-