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Deep freedom
Why the left should abandon equality

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

1 This essay represents an excerpt, edited by Juncture, from Roberto Mangabeira Unger's forthcoming booi<,
The Religion of the Future, to be published by Harvard University Press in the spring of 2014. © Roberto
Mangabeira Unger

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 MAIN FEATURE 94

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:
"Those who take
they accept the established institutional settlement. If they live in the rich the priority of
north Atlantic countries, the settlement that they chiefly accept is the equality over
social democratic compromise of the mid-20th century {with its New Deal freedom to be
counterpart in the United States). the keynote of
The progressives or leftists then become those who, within the limits of the the progressive
social democratic settlement, want more equality. What that must largely cause make an
mean, given respect for the established institutional arrangements, is after-
the-fact redistribution and regulation rather than any reshaping of either
imacknowledged
production or politics. By the terms of that bargain, any attempt to alter and decisive
fundamentally the productive and political arrangements was abandoned. assumption:
The state was allowed to gain wide-ranging powers to regulate, to they accept the
redistribute and to manage the economy ccunter-cyclically. established
The conservatives are, according to the same way of thinking, those who institutional
want to shift the weight of that historical compromise in the direction of settlement"
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 self-determination, 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 LIMITS 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

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 MAIN FEATURE 95

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 ot the state.
It is this simple and false scheme that is presupposed by the philosophies "Deep equality,
of distributive justice that exercise the greatest influence in these same
societies. The abstract and unhistorical character of these philosophies
however, is
cannot conceal their operative intent: the justification of compensatory opposed to the
redistribution under institutionally closed social democracy. Because their ideals and the
theoretical egalitarianism is the reverse side of their institutional emptiness interests that
or conservatism, they cannot make good on their professed aims. They
have been central
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 to socialism,
which they are committed. liberalism and
When we reject such an attempt to humanise the supposedly inevitable, we
democracy. The
turn away from shallow freedom and shallow equality to deep equality and first to reject it
deep freedom. Deep equality, however, is opposed to the ideals and the should be those
interests that have been central to socialism, liberalism and democracy. The who remain
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
faithful to the
reason to cast it aside. largest and most
enduring aims of
REJECTING DEEP EQUALITY the left."
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.

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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 *The abdication
to capture the concerns and aspirations that have historically driven
progressives. The common notion that the left is distinguished by the
of institutional
priority that it accords to equality over freedom remains plausible only reshaping
so long as we limit ourselves to comparing shallow freedom to shallow amounts to the
equality: only when the horizon of programmatic argument has narrowed belittlement of
to the point of balancing economic flexibility and social protection against the progressive
each other, within an institutional system that the political forces have no
impulse to reconstruct. The abdication of such institutional reshaping,
cause, leaving it
however, amounts to the belittlement of the progressive cause, leaving it unable to address
unable to address any of the major problems of contemporary societies. any of the major
problems of
DEEP FREEDOM IS THE SOLE DEFENSIBLE POLITICAL contemporary
GOAL OF PROGRESSIVES societies"
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

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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 "Deep freedom, in
need to organise a permanent experiment, both worldwide and in the
space of the independent states of the world, regarding the institutional
its fullest sense,
arrangements of a free society. Deep freedom, in its fullest sense, is the is the dialectic
dialectic between the conception of a free society and the cumulative between the
institutional innovations that can make this conception real. conception of a
These two elements - the idea and the institutions of freedom - develop free society and
together. The transformational process resulting from their reciprocal the cumulative
connection is more important and more revealing than any one moment institutional
in the marriage of conception to arrangements. The conception gains
meaning by reference to actual or imagined institutional developments. The
innovations that
institutional innovations, however, are not simply the technical translation can make this
into social reality of a conception independently established. Instead, the conception real."
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.
Market economies 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

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that would allow us to create non-formulaic jobs in large number. These "Free societies
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
must enjoy the
predominant form of free labour. power to innovate
Civil societies remain unorganised or unequally organised, under the
and to diverge
provisions of contract, corporate and labour law, and they are denied, as a in the way they
result of their disorganisation, the chance to share directly in the creation shape markets»
of alternative social futures. They cannot create law from the bottom up, democracies and
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
civil societies.
social life, rather than resting on the strong basis of direct responsibility They must
for the welfare of others, depends on the weak cement of money transfers possess both the
organised by government. institutional and
Civil society should be organised, independently and outside the state, the conceptual
the better to share actively and directly in the development of alternative means to create
social futures. It should not, and need not, do so simply through the work of novel varieties
elected officials and political parties. One occasion for such participation is
engagement in the provision of public services, especially in those services,
of political,
education first among them, that equip the context-transcending individual. economic and
Another opportunity lies in the generalisation of the principle that every social pluralism."
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.
Democracies 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.

WHICH INEQUALITIES MATTER?

The distinction between right and left has not lost its meaning.
Nevertheless, it needs to be redrawn. On this new account the

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conservatives are those who despair of our power to raise ourselves 'On this new
up, through the transformation of our arrangements, to a greater life,
account the
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 conservatives are
endowments) but for all. The progressives are those who insist on those who despair
transforming the institutional structure of society to the end of achieving of our power to
a greater life for all. This transformation may be gradual and piecemeal in raise oiu-selves
its method, but nevertheless radical in its outcome if it continues, informed
by a developing idea of freedom, in a particular direction.
up, through the
transformation of
The practical significance of deep freedom is made clear by spelling out
our arrangements^
its implications for inequality of circumstance.
to a greater life...
First, no inequality of circumstance should be tolerated that threatens either
The progressives
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 are those who insist
the public defense of an inclusive idea of freedom with an institutionalised on transforming
broadening of access to economic and educational opportunity. It is as the institutional
the result of the force of institutional arrangements resistant to revision
structure of society
that such inequalities exert their effect. It is by appealing to a defective,
partial idea of freedom that they retain their authority. The correction to the end of
of such inequalities should therefore rely first and foremost on the achieving a greater
change of institutions and the criticism of beliefs, only secondarily on life for all."
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 factsuspect.
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

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first two ideas {the primacy of equality of respect and of opportunity, and "Our chance
the exclusion of inequalities that result in privileged strangleholds on the
making of the future). They must be prevented from relegating the mass
ofrisingtoa
of ordinary men and women to dependent wage labour or to formulaic, greater life and of
machine-like work. Moreover, they should not be allowed to serve as achieving a deep
a disguise for the legitimation of class society or for the veneration of freedom is the
exceptional endowments under the banner of merit.
standard by which
should ultimately
RISING TO THE GREATER LIFE
distinguish
The ideal of equality - equality of respect and of opportunity, and greater
equality of circumstance only insofar as it enhances equality of opportunity
hetween the
and of respect, or is required by them - is best defended when it is permissible and
subordinated to the greater and more inclusive ideal of deep freedom. For the impermissible
it is this ideal that most directly touches our interest in making ourselves forms of inequality."
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.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger teaches at Harvard University. He was Brazil's
minister of strategic affairs in the administration of President Lula.

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