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Its altars are anything but cold. Its practical power and hopeful promise make every year an opportunity for modest reform and no year likely to be our 1648. It should be no surprise that those most eager to change the world would be harnessed to its reproduction. For those of my students who wish it were otherwise, this faith is the seductive obstacle. To turn back from reforms we know to be inadequate will require a refusal to take our eyes off the dynamics of struggle through which injustice is mysteriously reproduced by so many who intend just the opposite.

How could so unlikely a promise seem like a plausible political program for so many? Don’t laypeople also see, or at least suspect, that speeches like his are justifications for mobilizing resources behind the successful, deferring rather than underwriting the promise to compensate? Perhaps they do. But maybe they also sense that nothing so dramatic will happen anyway. And perhaps people think that is how politicians and World-­ Making Stories • 35 bureaucrats would frame choices that mattered to them in other ways or for other reasons.

The European Union offers the most obvious example. Debates between nations (Finland vs. Greece, Germany vs. Spain) or between center/right economic liberals and center/left social democrats are transformed into debates about the requirements of austerity, the demands of a single currency, entitlements of various stakeholders, or the free-­rider problems that may follow rewarding rather than punishing the profligate. At the same time, these large debates can be dissolved into matters of more or less in specific circumstances.