340 deep freedomcountries as well as in poorer ones? Or will these advanced practices
increasingly penetrate and transform wide areas of the society and the
economy? Th e answer to these vital questions depends on the institu-
tional reor ga ni za tion of market economies, representative democra-
cies, and in de pen dent civil societies. Such reor ga ni za tion cannot take
place within the limits of the established institutional and ideological
settlement.
Th e socially exclusive form of this change— the form that it now pre-
dominantly takes— is the path of least re sis tance: the one that we can
most easily tread because it disturbs the least the preexisting structure
of powerful interests. Any alternative supporting the diff usion of these
new forms of practical life throughout large parts of the economy and
the society requires the marriage of cumulative institutional innova-
tions in the or ga ni za tion of the market economy and of demo cratic
politics with a reinterpretation of our interests and of our ideals.
Th e emergence of this new way of doing things is not a horse that we
can ride to deep freedom. We can nevertheless use it to our larger ends,
but only if we redirect and reshape it. Radicalized in method, broad-
ened in scope, and made more inclusive in its social base, it can be
made to serve the dissolution of rigid structure and the triumph of
imagination over fate.
And so it will happen in every historical circumstance. In the po liti-
cal theology without God of the religion of the future, transcendence
no longer takes the form of projecting the good— our rise to a greater
life or to life eternal— onto a historical or providential future that leaves
us estranged from life in the present. Transcendence takes the form of
a rejection of the path of least re sis tance in the circumstance of our
time: working with the instruments of the circumstance against the
logic of the circumstance and, through such engagement and re sis-
tance, beginning to make ourselves right now into what we hope to
become.