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22 / 50 Marjolijn Dijkman
LUN Talks: Uncertainty Scenarios

Concepts of Time: Future

Platform for Climate Affairs
With Ifor Duncan and Tom Trevatt
Deep freedom: Why the left should abandon equality
By Roberto Mangabeira Unger
24 October 2013

The left will only renew itself, argues Roberto Mangabeira Unger,
if it gives up on equality and champions instead the cause of 'deep
freedom' and permanent institutional innovation.
According to a widespread belief, the distinction between the left and the right,
between progressives and conservatives in politics, is chiefly a difference between the
relative weights that they give to equality and to freedom. The leftists or progressives
would be those who give priority to equality, fairness or social justice; the
conservatives or liberals (in the contemporary European sense) those who put freedom
first. This set of identifications results from a confusion between shallow and deep
freedom or equality. It is, moreover, false to the history of progressive or leftist ideas.
We should reject it: it both reveals and reinforces a misguided direction in practical
politics as well as in political thought.
Instead, this essay contends that deep freedom should be the core progressive goal. In
opposition to the political ideas that have most recently guided ideological controversy
around the world, but similarly to those that used to influence such debate in the 19th
century, deep freedom combines a devotion to the empowerment of the ordinary
person - a raising up of ordinary life to a higher plane of intensity, scope and capability
- with a disposition to reshape the institutional arrangements of society in the service of
such empowerment. In the design of social, economic and democratic institutions, deep
freedom has priority over any form of equality of circumstance. Equality of
opportunity is a fragmentary aspect of deep freedom.
Institutional conservatism
Almost universally, the liberals and socialists of the 19th century viewed equality as an
aspect of freedom. Their core commitment was to the empowerment of both the
individual and the species: the formation of a greater humanity and of a greater self.
They differed in their understanding of this greatness as well as in the institutional

formulas on which, mistakenly, they pinned their hopes. They understood that no sane
man or woman who could have a greater life would settle instead for a rigid equality of
outcome or circumstance. They regarded abolition of the injustices of class society and
of economically dependent wage labour as an important part of the fight for a larger
freedom. They would never have accepted the notion that we can redress the greatest
evils of social life by compensatory and retrospective redistribution of income through
money transfers or social entitlement programmes organised by the state. In professing
these beliefs, they were revolutionaries, as we should be today and tomorrow,
opposing the established regime and prophesying a higher form of existence for
mankind.
Those who take the priority of equality over freedom to be the keynote of the
progressive cause make an unacknowledged and decisive assumption: they accept the
established institutional settlement. If they live in the rich north Atlantic countries, the
settlement that they chiefly accept is the social democratic compromise of the mid-20th
century (with its New Deal counterpart in the United States).
The progressives or leftists then become those who, within the limits of the social
democratic settlement, want more equality. What that must largely mean, given respect
for the established institutional arrangements, is after-the-fact redistribution and
regulation rather than any reshaping of either production or politics. By the terms of
that bargain, any attempt to alter fundamentally the productive and political
arrangements was abandoned. The state was allowed to gain wide-ranging powers to
regulate, to redistribute and to manage the economy counter-cyclically.
The conservatives are, according to the same way of thinking, those who want to shift
the weight of that historical compromise in the direction of freedom and efficiency. For
them, freedom is greater room for manoeuvre within the terms set by the established
forms of market economy and constitutional democracy: less regulation and less
redistribution so that there may be more space for individual initiative and selfdetermination, free from the tutelage of the state.
This primitive ideological structure invites a further narrowing of the scope of politics,
presented as a synthesis. The aim becomes to reconcile economic flexibility with social
protection.
The lim its of shallow freedom and shallow equality
Shallow freedom and shallow equality are freedom and equality viewed within the
restraints imposed by the prevailing institutional settlement. The actual experience of
political life provides an endless series of clues to the inadequacy of this view. For
example, at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, some of the
countries most admired as examples of social democracy experimented with an
initiatives that came to be dubbed 'flexisecurity': universal endowments instead of
tenure in particular jobs, with the result that - on a very small scale - it seemed possible
to enjoy more fairness and more flexibility at the same. No one, however, imagined
that a similar effort could be conducted on a much larger scale through the
reformation of the institutional arrangements - including the arrangements of property,
of contract, and of relations between public power and private initiative - that shape a
market economy.
Shallow freedom and shallow equality are false options. They are based on the
unwarranted acceptance of the existing institutional framework: the contingent
outcome of the last major institutional reformation. They presuppose the validity of a

simple and misleading hydraulic model of ideological debate: more market, less state;
more state, less market; or a combination of state and market designed to ensure that
the inequalities generated by the market are corrected by the redistributive and
regulatory activity of the state.
It is this simple and false scheme that is presupposed by the philosophies of distributive
justice that exercise the greatest influence in these same societies. The abstract and
unhistorical character of these philosophies cannot conceal their operative intent: the
justification of compensatory redistribution under institutionally closed social
democracy. Because their theoretical egalitarianism is the reverse side of their
institutional emptiness or conservatism, they cannot make good on their professed
aims. They argue for the humanisation of a world that they are powerless to reimagine
and remake, and define this humanisation narrowly, to suit the devices to which they
are committed.
When we reject such an attempt to humanise the supposedly inevitable, we turn away
from shallow freedom and shallow equality to deep equality and deep freedom. Deep
equality, however, is opposed to the ideals and the interests that have been central to
socialism, liberalism and democracy. The first to reject it should be those who remain
faithful to the largest and most enduring aims of the left. In the religion of the future
they will find further reason to cast it aside.
Rejecting deep equality
Deep equality is the priority accorded to some form of equality of circumstance or
outcome, achieved through whatever reshaping of institutions may be required to
achieve this goal. Equality of respect and equality of opportunity are intrinsic to
freedom and to the conception of a free society. Shallow and deep equality converge in
the primacy that they accord to equality of circumstance. This egalitarian commitment
may be formulated outright as a prohibition of extreme inequalities of living standards,
income or wealth. Alternatively, it may be qualified by a willingness to countenance
whatever inequalities can be justified by their contribution to the circumstances of the
worst-off, so long as the fundamental principles of equality of respect and of
opportunity remain inviolate.
Deep equality is distinguished from shallow equality by its refusal to take the
established institutional arrangements, including those that shape the market economy,
for granted. Its characteristic device is not, as with shallow equality, compensatory
redistribution by tax and transfer. It is a change in the institutional arrangements,
especially those that organise production and exchange, the better to influence the
primary distribution of wealth and income.
Deep equality is what, for example, the Spartans had among themselves, although not
with the subjugated helots. It is what Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, William Morris and
many other socialists of the past have desired. It can be secured only by imposing
radical restraints on the sale of property and the accumulation of capital.
One major historical instance of such a project is the state socialism of the 20th
century in those periods - such as Stalin's rural collectivisation drive or Mao's Cultural
Revolution - when egalitarianism gained the upper hand. The collectivisation as well as
the nationalisation of the means of production, the outlawing of any private
accumulation of capital, the widespread restraint on the alienation or acquisition of
significant property, and the insistence on suppressing private wage labour all formed
part of these experiences.

Who wants deep equality? Not the hundreds of millions who have fled from
countryside to city, even when no work awaits them there. Not the multitudes who sit
transfixed before their screens watching the fantastical narratives of empowerment and
escape of the popular romantic culture. Not those seeking more consumption, more
excitement, more diversion, more capability. No one wants it who could have, with a
measure of abundance, anything else. And when they want it - if indeed they
understand it - they want it only as a consolation, in the absence of such more
appealing goods. Austerity, drudgery and monotony, a narrowing of alternatives of
action, can seem an acceptable form of existence only if they appear to be the sole
alternative to stark oppression. Ancient Sparta has few takers.
Deep equality cannot be the core of the progressive programme. It fails to capture the
concerns and aspirations that have historically driven progressives. The common
notion that the left is distinguished by the priority that it accords to equality over
freedom remains plausible only so long as we limit ourselves to comparing shallow
freedom to shallow equality: only when the horizon of programmatic argument has
narrowed to the point of balancing economic flexibility and social protection against
each other, within an institutional system that the political forces have no impulse to
reconstruct. The abdication of such institutional reshaping, however, amounts to the
belittlement of the progressive cause, leaving it unable to address any of the major
problems of contemporary societies.
Deep freedom is the sole defensible political goal of progressives
The classical liberal idea of freedom, developed in the course of the 19th century and
inspiring even now many of the secular projects of social and personal liberation,
combined an ideal of individual empowerment with a programme for the institutional
reconstruction of society. Both the programme and the ideal are defective. The
programme put unwarranted trust in a particular system of private and public rights a way of organising the economy and the state - that has proved to be an insufficient
safeguard against oppression and an inadequate basis on which to develop our
individual and collective powers. Its mistake was not simply to have chosen one
institutional formula rather than another; it was above all to have committed itself
dogmatically to any such formula. Moreover, the ideal of individual empowerment to
which this institutional formula was wedded remained too closely modeled on a
narrow aristocratic ideal of self-possession to serve as a guide to the achievement of a
greater life.
A commitment to deep freedom avoids these pitfalls. It recognises the need to organise
a permanent experiment, both worldwide and in the space of the independent states of
the world, regarding the institutional arrangements of a free society. Deep freedom, in
its fullest sense, is the dialectic between the conception of a free society and the
cumulative institutional innovations that can make this conception real.
These two elements - the idea and the institutions of freedom - develop together. The
transformational process resulting from their reciprocal connection is more important
and more revealing than any one moment in the marriage of conception to
arrangements. The conception gains meaning by reference to actual or imagined
institutional developments. The institutional innovations, however, are not simply the
technical translation into social reality of a conception independently established.
Instead, the institutional choices disclose the ambiguities and the alternative possible
directions concealed, at any moment, within the idea.

There is no stock set of institutional arrangements that, once enacted, make the
conception of a free society live in social reality. There is an open array of institutional
enhancements, many of them rough and flawed functional equivalents to other such
arrangements. What matters is the direction, defined precisely through the interaction
between the understanding and the arrangements. While compensatory redistribution
produces its effects immediately, in the form of resource transfer, institutional change
produces such effects in historical time. Unless the relevant timespan is arbitrarily
restricted, the most extreme inequalities now could in principle be justified by their
speculative contribution to the improvement of the conditions of the most
disadvantaged at a much later time.
Free societies must enjoy the power to innovate and to diverge - within themselves, not
just among themselves - in the way they shape markets, democracies and civil societies.
They must possess both the institutional and the conceptual means to create novel
varieties of political, economic and social pluralism. The established forms of the
market economy, representative democracy and independent civil society are hostile to
such experimentation.
M arket econom ies remain fastened to a particular version of the idea of such an
economy, embodied in their systems of private law and often justified as the natural
and necessary expression of spontaneous order in economic life. Alternative regimes of
property and contract should, instead, come to coexist experimentally, gaining a
greater or lesser foothold in different parts of the economic order. As a result, freedom
to recombine factors of production within an unchallenged framework of production
and exchange would be extended into freedom to innovate continuously in the
arrangements comprising such a framework. Our liberation from machine-like jobs
depends on the massive economic and cultural changes that would allow us to create
non-formulaic jobs in large number. These changes are unlikely in turn to advance far
until wage labour begins to give way to some combination of self-employment and
cooperation as the predominant form of free labour.
Civil societies remain unorganised or unequally organised, under the provisions of
contract, corporate and labour law, and they are denied, as a result of their
disorganisation, the chance to share directly in the creation of alternative social futures.
They cannot create law from the bottom up, not even regarding their own
organisation. All they can do is vie for voice and influence in the making of law by the
state. The bonds of solidarity in social life, rather than resting on the strong basis of
direct responsibility for the welfare of others, depends on the weak cement of money
transfers organised by government.
Civil society should be organised, independently and outside the state, the better to
share actively and directly in the development of alternative social futures. It should
not, and need not, do so simply through the work of elected officials and political
parties. One occasion for such participation is engagement in the provision of public
services, especially in those services, education first among them, that equip the
context-transcending individual. Another opportunity lies in the generalisation of the
principle that every able-bodied adult should have at some time a responsibility to take
care of other people outside their own family, thus providing social solidarity with a
foundation stronger than money.
Dem ocracies continue to be established in ways that render change dependent on
crisis and allow an established structure to retain, until the next crisis, its semblance of
naturalness, necessity and authority. For democratic politics, the task is to understand

and to organise democratic politics as the collective discovery and creation of the new
in social life, not simply as the rule of the majority, limited by the rights of political
and social minorities. Constitutional arrangements should hasten the pace of politics the facility for structural change - as well as raising its temperature - the level of
popular engagement in public life. They should exploit the experimentalist potential of
federalism to generate counter models of the social future and to establish in the state a
power to rescue groups from situations of exclusion or disadvantage that they are
unable to overcome by the means of collective action available to them. They should
impart to representative democracy features of direct democracy. By all these devices
they should vastly expand our power to create the new and the different, without
requiring crisis as the condition of change.
Deep freedom is therefore freedom grasped and realised through change of our
institutions and practices - not just through a one-time change but through a practice
that can generate future, ongoing changes in the institutional order of society.
W hich inequalities m atter?
The distinction between right and left has not lost its meaning. Nevertheless, it needs to
be redrawn. On this new account the conservatives are those who despair of our power
to raise ourselves up, through the transformation of our arrangements, to a greater life,
not for a group favoured by society (in the form of hereditary economic and
educational advantage) or by nature (in the form of greater genetic endowments) but
for all. The progressives are those who insist on transforming the institutional structure
of society to the end of achieving a greater life for all. This transformation may be
gradual and piecemeal in its method, but nevertheless radical in its outcome if it
continues, informed by a developing idea of freedom, in a particular direction.
The practical significance of deep freedom is made clear by spelling out its implications
for inequality of circumstance.
First, no inequality of circumstance should be tolerated that threatens either equality of
respect or equality of opportunity. These two aspects of equality form part of freedom.
They can be secured only by the combination of the public defense of an inclusive idea
of freedom with an institutionalised broadening of access to economic and educational
opportunity. It is as the result of the force of institutional arrangements resistant to
revision that such inequalities exert their effect. It is by appealing to a defective, partial
idea of freedom that they retain their authority. The correction of such inequalities
should therefore rely first and foremost on the change of institutions and the criticism
of beliefs, only secondarily on compensatory redistribution.
Second, inequalities of circumstance resulting in inequalities of opportunity or respect
become especially damaging when they are expressed as privileged holds on the
economic, political or cultural resources by which, both individually and collectively,
we create the future within the present. If, for example, the result of an inequality of
circumstance is to allow a certain class of society to exert decisive influence over the
government, under the disguise of democratic institutions, and in effect to buy political
influence, the system of freedom is violated. Once again, inclusive engagement in the
creation of the future within the present requires, above all, innovation in our
arrangements and beliefs, regarding the organisation of the market economy, of
democratic politics, and of civil society.
Third, inequalities of circumstance that have as their consequence or their expression
the subversion of free labour, or the predominance of the inferior form of free labour

(wage work) over the superior forms (self-employment and cooperation), or the
consignment of people to work that could be performed by machines, are by that very
fact suspect.
Fourth, inequalities of circumstance that result from the reproduction of class society
by the hereditary transmission of unequal economic and educational advantage
through the family are to be combatted. Only the institutionalised broadening of
economic and educational opportunity can effectively overcome them.
Fifth, inequalities of circumstance may be defended by their supposed contribution to
the development of the wealth and practical powers of society. However, the
inequalities thus justified must never be allowed to accumulate to the point of
trespassing on the concerns expressed by the first two ideas (the primacy of equality of
respect and of opportunity and the exclusion of inequalities that result in privileged
strangleholds on the making of the future). They must be prevented from relegating the
mass of ordinary men and women to dependent wage labour or to formulaic, machinelike work. Moreover, they should not be allowed to serve as a disguise for the
legitimation of class society or for the veneration of exceptional endowments under the
banner of merit.
Rising to the greater life
The ideal of equality - equality of respect and of opportunity, and greater equality of
circumstance only insofar as it enhances equality of opportunity and of respect, or is
required by them - is best defended when it is subordinated to the greater and more
inclusive ideal of deep freedom. For it is this ideal that most directly touches our
interest in making ourselves more human by making ourselves more godlike. The
revolutionary reach of this ideal becomes clear as soon as we insist on equipping it
with its most necessary instrument: the institutional reorganisation of society.
Those will be disappointed who expect from ideas about the limits to permissible
inequality of circumstance, like those summarised above, a metric of distributive
justice. The institutions of society and the ideas predominant in its public culture count
for more than the instantaneous reallocation that can be achieved only, if at all, by
retrospective and compensatory redistribution. The direction of social and personal
change matters more than the short-term arithmetic of redistribution. Our chance of
rising to a greater life and of achieving a deep freedom is the standard by which should
ultimately distinguish between the permissible and the impermissible forms of
inequality.

This essay appears in issue 20(2) of Juncture, IPPR's quarterly journal for rethinking
the centre-left. This essay represents an excerpt, edited byJuncture, from Roberto
Mangabeira Unger's forthcoming book, The Religion of the Future, to be published by
Harvard University Press in the spring of 2014. (C) Roberto Mangabeira Unger