inward and constitutive integration of persons, that culminating step from equal
rights to fraternal communion must be voluntary.
It was a moment of great promise. If the task of liberal institutions is to release
the creative powers of the free mind, while also guarding against its risks, social
liberalism is a sensible third way between the libertarians and the socialists. So it
was this name, the Third Way, that Clinton and Blair gave to their distinctive public
philosophy. New Democrat and New Labour seemed to be in the process of
establishing a complex of institutions which would repeat the success of welfare
reform in new programs in suchWelds as education, health care, the environment,
Wscal policy, and law and order. The Third Way also had a global aspect as a model
for other free countries. In its glory days from 1998 through 2000 , these proposals
were seen as promising to strengthen the liberal nation state against ‘‘rogue states’’
and ‘‘terrorists’’ and won the approval of a series of summits of left-of-center
governments in the West. Perhaps the most grandiose was the Berlin meeting on
June 1 , 2000 when thirteen heads of governments signed a joint communique ́
praising the Third Way and advocating a comprehensive global program of reforms
as ‘‘a new international social compact.’’ In the individual states, however, the
institutional demand proved hard, sometimes too hard, to meet and after 9 / 11
American leadership succumbed to the more immediate needs of national security.
As recently as the dedication of his Presidential Library on November 19 , 2004 ,
however, Clinton could still hail the Third Way and repeat his mantra of Commu-
nity, Opportunity, and Responsibility.
4 A Good Word for Institutionalism
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Institutionalism is a big tent. This review of my work has helped me see how the
concept I have chosen gets at the role of ideas in history. My basic working
hypothesis is that the free mind is and ought to be the ethical premise of modernity
and the governing force in modernization. Switching from JeVersonian rhetoric
to modern social science, I say in the words of CliVord Geertz, ‘‘the autonomous
process of symbol formulation’’ enables man to be ‘‘the agent of his own
realization’’ who through ‘‘the construction of schematic images of social order...
makes himself for better or worse a political animal.’’ Liberalism in the very
broadest sense is the word for this primary norm and fact. The politics of the
free mind that follows from this liberal premise promises achievement on a grand
scale, but also threatens self-inXicted failure and disaster. The need for some means
to realize the promise and avert the perils points toward an institutional approach.
714 samuel h. beer