Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Encyclopedia
Roberto Mangabeira Unger (b. March 24, 1947, Rio de Janeiro
) is a philosopher and politician. He has written widely on social, political, legal, and economic theory, much of which has laid the philosophical and theoretical groundwork for reimagining and remaking the social and political order. He has made substantial forays into philosophies of human nature and knowledge, and more recently into religion and science. He was a co-founder of the Critical Legal Studies
movement in the 1970s, and has been a tenured faculty at the Harvard Law School
since 1976, where he taught Barack Obama
. Unger has long been active in Brazilian oppositional movements and politics, and served as the Minister of Strategic Affairs under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
.
Four intellectual programs are central to Unger's philosophical and political work: (1) developing a systematic alternative to the rationalizing and idealizing style of legal thought (2) developing a social theory that offers an alternative to the typological and deterministic thought of Marxism
and neo-liberalism (3) re-imagining institutional alternatives, such as the market, democracy and civic society; and (4) developing a philosophical position that vindicates the reality of time, the openness of history, and the possibility of the new.
on March 24, 1947. Although his parents lived in the United States at the time, his father, Artur Unger, suffered a heart attack during a family visit to Brazil, which delayed their return to the US and led to the birth of Roberto Unger in Brazil. After the elder Unger's recovery, the family of three returned to New York. The young Unger spent his childhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side and attended the private Allen-Stevenson School.
Both of Unger's parents were accomplished intellectuals. His Dresden
-born father, who had arrived in the United States as a child and became a naturalized citizen, was a lawyer. His mother, Edyla Mangabeira, was a Brazilian poet and feminist journalist. They met in the US during the exile of Unger's maternal grandfather, Octávio Mangabeira, who was a liberal politician from the state of Bahia. He was a former professor of astronomy who gained popularity and was elected governor after an inspired public lecture in 1910 on Halley's Comet. He went on to serve as Brazil's minister of foreign affairs in the late 1920s before the dictatorship of Getulio Vargas
forced him out of the country. Unger continues to express deep admiration of his grandfather and has often noted the his influence.
When he was 11, Unger and his mother moved back to Brazil upon the death of his father. Unger attended Jesuit school where he learned to speak proper Portuguese, and went on to graduate from Rio law school in December 1969. He was admitted in September 1969 to Harvard Law School in anticipation of the successful completion of his exams. Having arrived too late for orientation, Harvard arranged special tutoring for late arrivals, which gave Unger the opportunity to get to know and debate the faculty.
With Brazil under a military dictatorship and Unger unable to return, Harvard invited him to stay for a second year and teach. At 23 years old, Unger began teaching first year contracts to first year students.
from the Harvard Law School
. In that same year, he also won a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship
. Although appointed to the faculty of law, Unger often taught courses in social theory and philosophy. For his class "Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel" the dean once asked him to append "and the law." Unger recalled that, "I said no because of the code of honor that kept me from saying yes to a figure in authority. … And he just laughed and shrugged his shoulders, and that was that. Basically no Harvard Law School dean since then has ever asked me for anything."
The beginning of Unger's successful and influential career in academia began with his doctoral thesis, which was published as Law in Modern Society in 1976. Taking the likes of Marx and Weber as his conversationalists, he explored the origins of law in modern West and the pressures that were beginning to undermine contemporary legal arrangements. The key question it asked was why modern societies have legal systems with distinctions between institutions, such as legislature and court, and have a special caste of lawyers who have method of reasoning about social problems? Marx and Weber
explained this as an economic necessity for the grounds of capitalist development. Unger argued that it was the result of political and cultural developments specific to Western Europe, and that there is no real basis of fact on their necessary integration. Similarly, his first book, Knowledge and Politics, published in 1975, took aim at liberal political philosophy, which he argued reduced the world to false antinomies—rules vs. values, reason vs. desire, etc.
These works led to the co-founding of Critical Legal Studies
(CLS) with Duncan Kennedy and Morton Horwitz
. The movement stirred up controversy in legal schools across America as it challenged standard legal scholarship and made radical proposals for legal education. By the early 1980s, the movement had hundred of adherents with annual events and conferences. A few years later, the CLS movement touched off a heated internal debate at Harvard, pitting the CLS scholars against the older, more traditional scholars. Despite later distancing himself from the movement when it took a turn in new directions, critics have said that Unger's social theory provides the only credible basis for CLS critique of ruling ideas of legal thought. Unger himself said that CLS's most significant legacy is to treat legal thought "as an inquiry into the possibilities of reconstruction" — a tool for devising better institutions.
Throughout much of the 1980s, Unger worked on his magnum opus, Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory, a three volume work on social change and alternative rivaling that of Marx. The series takes to the hilt the insight of society as an artifact, and smashes the idea of the necessity of certain institutional arrangements. The books are the natural outgrowth of his earlier work on law, extending the notion of the arbitrary social constructions of legal institutions to that of all of human activity. Published in 1987, Politics issues a devastating critique of contemporary social theory and politics, develops a profound and highly original theory of structural and ideological change, gives an alternative account of world history, and then works out the consequences in a vision for the future. By first tearing down the idea that there is a necessary progression from one set of institutional arrangements to another, e.g. feudalism to capitalism, and then building an anti-necessitarian theory of social change
of how we get from one set of institutional arrangements to another, these works lay the basis for re-imagining the world and creating a viable alternative to the North Atlantic liberal democracies
.
Unger has devoted much of the following decades to further elaborating on the insights developed in Politics through a working out of the political and social alternatives. What Should Legal Analysis Become? (Verso, 1996) developed tools to reimagine the organization of social life. Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative (Verso, 1998) and What Should the Left Propose? (Verso, 2005) put forth alternative institutional proposals.
In 2004, Unger was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
.
, and a few years later, he returned to Brazil to direct a foundation for needy children in the country's burgeoning urban slums. He even ran an eight-week lightning campaign for a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, which he lost by a narrow margin.
In the late 1990s, along with Mexican political scientist Jorge Castañeda Gutman, Unger began to put together an informal network of politicians and business leaders dedicated to redrawing the political map. Dubbed the Latin American Alternative the thrust of the group was to provide viable proposals alongside the critic of neoliberalism
. They put forward proposals such as guaranteeing every citizen a "social right" to schooling and a job; breaking up media oligopolies; and holding town meetings to help citizens supervise municipal spending. Although Unger and Castañeda agree with others on the left who insist that the state must preserve a social safety net, they argue that money should be raised not through progressive taxes on income but through a value-added tax on consumption—this tax may increase the cost of living for some poor people, but it has the advantage of forcing the rich to actually pay it.
He has advised and discussed his ideas with numerous Latin American politicians and political candidates. He helped Leonel Brizola
, a two-time governor of Rio de Janeiro run for president twice, although unsuccessfully. Later, Unger also worked closely with another presidential candidate, Ciro Gomes
. He similarly discussed implementing some of his ideas with Mexican politician Vicente Fox, first as governor of Guanajuato and then as president.
, or IPEA, a government think tank
previously attached to the Planning Ministry. Unger's nomination was reported to cause fear within the IPEA that he would politicize the institution, which has traditionally been seen as apolitical and independent, and it was even reported that he would disband a long-standing IPEA workgroup that had existed for thirty years.
On May 8, 2008 Lula designated Unger chief minister to coordinate the future of Amazon policy. This led to the resignation of the minister of environment in protest. Unger went on to sign a collaborative agreement with Russia.
On June 26, 2009, President Lula announced Unger would be leaving the government and returning to Harvard, which has a strict two-year limit for leaves of absence.
Specifically, Unger called for political solutions that would broaden access to production forces such as information technology, and for states to focus on equipping and monitoring civil society rather than trying to provide social services. He also advocated the weakening of strong executives by making branches of government mutually accountable to one another – the reduction in executive power, he said, would desirably "heighten the temperature of politics".
was why modern societies have legal system with distinctions between institutions, such as legislature and court, and have special caste of lawyers possessing a method of reasoning about social problems? And more so, why did these practices first emerge in Western Europe? Theorists such as Marx and Weber, not to mention the neoliberalist thinkers, had argued that this was a product of economic necessity to secure property rights and the autonomy of the individual. Unger rejected such a determinist explanation and went on to argue in Law and Modern Society that this system of private rights is not based on necessity, effectiveness, or moral superiority, but rather the result of a particular and contingent political and cultural development.
Unger identified three types of law, which fit into ideal types and satisfied conditions of legitimizing social order, reflecting the nature of social relations, and representing meaningful totality. These three types are customary law (characteristic of tribal societies), bureaucratic law (emergent in agrarian empires), and the liberal legal order of today (which is general, public, positive, and autonomous). It is this third type, the liberal legal order, that must be explained and not assumed.
Unger argued that in its development, the liberal legal order holds all equal before the law, thus stripping the ruler of any immunity. This led to a separation of powers and a practice in which rules are autonomous, not moral or religious. Likewise, institutions of the law are autonomous and legal reasoning adheres to the established set of rules rather than moral codes. Rather than any necessary connection between this set of legal codes and economic order, this legal thought and arrangements arose in Europe as a result of the indeterminate relations between monarchy, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie. It took the particular generality of form that it did from the long tradition of natural law
and universality.
Conventional social science and the theories that it has left us with today fall into one of two types: deep-structure social theory and positive social science. The former make a distinction between routine practices and the underlying institutional contexts that shape those practices. At the same time, however, this type of social theory couples this distinction with indivisible types of social organization and deep seated constraints and developmental laws. As such, the possibilities of human social development is limited and constrained. The latter practice of positive social science refuses to take the distinction between formative context and formed routines as the central practice of social and historical explanation, but rather sees society and history as an endless series of episodes of problem solving. What this has led to is either the social sciences adhering to a script of history or social organization, or forsaking any attempt at explanation in favor of just detailing conflict and resolution.
Unger thus sees that the state of the social sciences and humanities today have succumbed to the sway of three impulses that stagnate their development and curtail their transformative power. These are the rationalizing, humanizing, and escapist impulses.
In this effort of constructive social theory Unger began by formulating the theory of false necessity
, which claims that our social worlds are the artifact of our own human endeavors. There is no pre-set institutional arrangement that our societies adhere to, and there is no necessary historical mold of development that they will follow. Rather we are free to choose and develop the forms and the paths that our societies will take through a process of conflicts and resolutions. However, there are groups of institutional arrangements that work together to bring out certain institutional forms, liberal democracy, for example. These forms are the basis of a social structure, and which Unger calls formative context
. In order to explain how we move from one formative context to another without the conventional social theory constraints of historical necessity (e.g. feudalism to capitalism), and to do so while remaining true to the key insight of individual human empowerment and anti-necessitarian social thought, Unger recognized that there are an infinite number of ways of resisting social and institutional constraints, which can lead to an infinite number of outcomes. This variety of forms of resistance and empowerment
make change possible. Unger calls this empowerment negative capability
.
To think about social transformation programmatically, one must first mark the direction one wants society to move in, and then identify the first steps with which we can move in that direction. In this way we can formulate proposals at points along the trajectory, be they relatively close to how things are now or relatively far away. This provides a third way between revolution and reform. It is revolutionary reform, where one has a revolutionary vision, but acts on that vision in a sequence of piecemeal reforms. As Unger puts it, transformative politics is "not about blueprints; it is about pathways. It is not architecture; it is music."
is Unger's vision of a more open and more plastic set of social institutions through which individuals and groups can interact, propose change, and effectively empower themselves to transform social, economic, and political structures. The key strategy is to combine freedom of commerce and governance at the local level with the ability of political parties at the central government level to promote radical social experiments that would bring about decisive change in social and political institutions.
In practice, the theory would involve radical developments in politics at the center, as well as social innovation in localities. At the center, by bestowing wide ranging revisionary powers to those in office, it would give political parties the ability to try out concrete yet profound solutions and proposals. It would turn partisan conflicts over control and uses of governmental power into an opportunity to question and revise the basic arrangements of social life through a rapid resolution of political impasse. In local communities, empowered democracy would make capital and technology available through rotating capital funds, which would encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. Citizens rights include individual entitlements to economic and civic security, conditional and temporary group claims to portions of social capital, and destabilization rights, which would empower individuals or groups to disrupt organizations and practices marred by routines of subjugation that normal politics have failed to disrupt.
, and to return to a time of greater government involvement and stronger social programs. The humanizing (or ‘reformist’) Left accepts the world in its present form, taking the market economy and globalization as unavoidable, and attempts to humanize their effects through tax-and-transfer policies
.
Unger finds the two major orientations of contemporary Leftism inadequate and calls for a ‘Reconstructive Left’ – one that would insist on redirecting the course of globalization by reorganizing the market economy. In his two books The Left Alternative and The Future of American Progressivism, Unger lays out program to democratize the market economy and deepen democracy. This Reconstructive Left would look beyond debates on the appropriate size of government, and instead re-envision the relationship between government and firms in the market economy by experimenting with the coexistence of different regimes of private and social property. It would, like the recalcitrant and humanizing Left, be committed to social solidarity, but “would refuse to allow our moral interests in social cohesion [to] rest solely upon money transfers commanded by the state in the form of compensatory and retrospective redistribution,” as is the case with federal entitlement programs. Instead, Unger’s Reconstructive Left affirms “the principle that everyone should share, in some way and at some time, responsibility for taking care of other people.”
Unger has laid out concrete policy proposals in areas of economic development, education, civil society, and political democracy.
The instrumental conception of work is the idea that work “lacks any intrinsic authority” nor “any power of its own to confer dignity or direction on a human life.” Unger argues that to conceive of one’s workaday activity in this manner is to “view the social world as utterly oppressive or alien.” To Unger, those who see work this way are denied any sense of belonging to the world.
The final conception of work – one that Unger argues is turning things inside out – connects self-fulfillment and transformation. In this conception, one’s work is a struggle against the defects or the limits of existing society or available knowledge. Those with such ‘transformative vocations’ find that “self-fulfillment and service to society combine” and “resistance becomes the price of salvation.” Unger argues that the idea of transformative vocation is an insurgent, growing ideas in the world, waging “a largely mute spiritual struggle against the other two notions of work.”
The philosophy of the singularity of the world and reality of time establishes history as the site of decisive action through the propositions that there is only one true world, not multiple or simultaneous universes, and that time really exists in the world, not as a simulacrum through which we must experience the world. These ideas put Kant and his legacy on trial, and reaffirm the openness of the future through insight into "the actual and imagination into the possible."
These two concepts of infinity and reality lie at the heart of Unger's program calling for metaphysical and institutional revolutions. To insist on the embodiment of spirit in the world the routines that it cannot penetrate or transform must be broken, which can only be done by changing our social institutions in wholly new ways that leave open all possibilities and allow experimentalism in life and social structures. To see the individual as context transcending means that the we must be able to recreate our context, which can only be done in a singular world within which time is real.
Unger’s aim is twofold. First, to level a critique, expansion, and defense of modern thinking about the human and society “so that this practice can better withstand the criticisms that philosophy since Hume
and Kant
has leveled against it.” And second, to develop a prescriptive theory of human identity centered around what Unger calls the passions
—our raw responses to the world that are ambivalent towards reasons but also act in the service of reason. He outlines nine passions that organize and are organized by our dealings with others: lust, despair, hatred, vanity, jealousy, envy, faith, hope, and love. While these emotional states may be seen as raw emotion, their expression is always conditioned by the context within which the individual mobilizes or learns to mobilize them.
and the human condition
. Religion, Unger argues, is a vision of the world within which we anchor our orientation to life. It is within this orientation that we deal with our greatest terrors and highest hopes. Because we are doomed to die, we hope for eternal life; because we are unable to grasps to totality of existence or of the universe, we try to dispel the mystery and provide a comprehensible explanation; because we have an insatiable desire, we cry for an object that is worthy of this desire, one that is infinite. Humans initially invested religious discourse in nature and the human susceptibility to nature. But as societies evolved and people developed ways to cope with the unpredictability of nature, the emphasis of religion shifted to social existence and its defects. A new moment in religion will begin, Unger argues, when we stop telling ourselves that all will be fine and we begin to face the incorrigible flaws in human existence. The future of religion lies in embracing our mortality and our groundlessness.
Unger see four flaws in the human condition. They are, our mortality and the facing of imminent death; our groundlessness in that we are unable to grasp the solution to the enigma of existence, see the beginning or end of time, nor put off the discovery of the meaning of life; our insatiability in that we always want more, and demand the infinite from the finite; and our susceptibility to belittlement which places us in a position to constantly confront petty routine forcing us to die many little deaths.
There are three major responses in the history of human thought to these flaws: escape, humanization, and confrontation.
Unger's call is for a revolution in our religious beliefs that encompasses both individual transformation and institutional reorganization; to create change in the life of the individual as well as in the organization of society. The first part of the program of individual transformation means waking from the dazed state in which we live our lives, and recognizing our mortality and groundlessness without turning to the feel good theologies and philosophies. The second part of the program of social transformation means supplementing the metaphysical revolution with institutional practices by creating social institutions that allow us to constantly overthrow our constraints and our context, and to make this overthrow not a one time event but a continuing process. This is the program of empowered democracy
that calls for reforms in the market economy, eduction, politics, and civil society. "The goal is not to humanize society but to divinize humanity." It is "to raise ordinary life to a higher level of intensity and capability."
of David Hume
, reject the position of Kant
, and attack the speculations about parallel universes
of contemporary cosmology
. At stake is the laying of the foundations for a view of the world and causality that is open to all possibilities; that is not a closed system of options in which our future is governed by deterministic laws and typologies. It is an understanding of society that rejects the naturalness and necessity of current social arrangements; "a form of understanding of society and history that refuses to explain the present arrangements in a manner that vindicates their naturalness and necessity."
The thesis of the singularity of the world states that there is one real world. Such a thesis stands in stark contrast to contemporary theoretical physics
and cosmology, which speculate about multiple universes out of the dilemma of how to have law like explanations if the universe is unique--laws will be universal because they don't just apply to this unique universe but to all universes. However, there is no empirical evidence for multiple worlds. Unger's singularity thesis can better address our empirical observations and set the conceptual platform to address the four main puzzles in cosmology today: big bang
, initial conditions, horizon problem
, and the precise value of constants, such as gravity, speed of light
, and Planck's constant.
The thesis that time is real states that time really is real and everything is subject to history. This move is to historicize everything, even the laws of nature, and to challenge our acting as if time were real but not too real--we act as if it is somewhat real otherwise there would be no causal relations, but not so real that laws change. Unger holds that time is so real that laws of nature are also subject to its force and they too must change. There are no eternal laws upon which change occurs, rather time precedes structure. This position gives the universe a history and makes time non-emergent, global, irreversible, and continuous.
Bringing these two thesis together, Unger theorizes that laws of nature develop together with the phenomenon they explain. Laws and initial conditions co-evolve, in the same that they do in how cells reproduce and mutate in different levels of complexity of organisms. In cosmological terms Unger explains the passing from one structure to another at the origins of the universe when the state of energy was high but not infinite, and the freedom of movement was greater than when operating under a known set of laws. The conditions of the early universe is compatible with the universe that preceded it. The new universe may be different in structure, but has been made with what existed in the old one, e.g. masses of elementary particles, strength of different forces, and cosmologigcal constants. As the universe cools the phenomena and laws work together with materials produced by sequence; they are path dependent materials. They are also constrained by the family of resemblances of the effective laws against the background of the conceptions of alternative states the universe and succession of universes.
Early reviewers of Politics questioned Unger's seeming predicament of criticizing a system of thought and its historical tradition without subjecting himself to the same critical gaze. "There is little acknowledgment that he himself is writing in a particular socio-historical context," wrote one reviewer, and another asked, "in what context Unger himself is situated and why that context itself is not offered up to the sledgehammer." Such criticism has largely been answered by Unger with his enumeration of the revolutionary orthodoxy and his outline of world history.
Critics also balked at the lack of example or concrete vision of his social and political proposals. As one critic wrote, "it is difficult to imagine what Unger's argument would mean in practice," and that "he does not tell us what to make." Others have pointed out that the lack of imagination of such readers is precisely what is at stake, while Unger has since answered such criticism with works on social, political, and economic alternatives.
Reviewers of Unger's books have found his writing style philosophically dense and explanations voluminous. One reviewer termed his political thought "a staged exercise in political mystique." However, Richard Rorty
and others lavished praise for such poetics, comparing Unger to Walt Whitman
, and Unger's most recent book, The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound, provides more accessible and condensed access to his thought.
Biographical Articles about Roberto Unger:
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...
) is a philosopher and politician. He has written widely on social, political, legal, and economic theory, much of which has laid the philosophical and theoretical groundwork for reimagining and remaking the social and political order. He has made substantial forays into philosophies of human nature and knowledge, and more recently into religion and science. He was a co-founder of the Critical Legal Studies
Critical legal studies
Critical legal studies is a movement in legal thought that applied methods similar to those of critical theory to law. The abbreviations "CLS" and "Crit" are sometimes used to refer to the movement and its adherents....
movement in the 1970s, and has been a tenured faculty at the Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
since 1976, where he taught Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
. Unger has long been active in Brazilian oppositional movements and politics, and served as the Minister of Strategic Affairs under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva , known popularly as Lula, served as the 35th President of Brazil from 2003 to 2010.A founding member of the Workers' Party , he ran for President three times unsuccessfully, first in the 1989 election. Lula achieved victory in the 2002 election, and was inaugurated as...
.
Four intellectual programs are central to Unger's philosophical and political work: (1) developing a systematic alternative to the rationalizing and idealizing style of legal thought (2) developing a social theory that offers an alternative to the typological and deterministic thought of Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
and neo-liberalism (3) re-imagining institutional alternatives, such as the market, democracy and civic society; and (4) developing a philosophical position that vindicates the reality of time, the openness of history, and the possibility of the new.
Early life
Roberto Mangabeira Unger was born in Rio de JaneiroRio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...
on March 24, 1947. Although his parents lived in the United States at the time, his father, Artur Unger, suffered a heart attack during a family visit to Brazil, which delayed their return to the US and led to the birth of Roberto Unger in Brazil. After the elder Unger's recovery, the family of three returned to New York. The young Unger spent his childhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side and attended the private Allen-Stevenson School.
Both of Unger's parents were accomplished intellectuals. His Dresden
Dresden
Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....
-born father, who had arrived in the United States as a child and became a naturalized citizen, was a lawyer. His mother, Edyla Mangabeira, was a Brazilian poet and feminist journalist. They met in the US during the exile of Unger's maternal grandfather, Octávio Mangabeira, who was a liberal politician from the state of Bahia. He was a former professor of astronomy who gained popularity and was elected governor after an inspired public lecture in 1910 on Halley's Comet. He went on to serve as Brazil's minister of foreign affairs in the late 1920s before the dictatorship of Getulio Vargas
Getúlio Vargas
Getúlio Dornelles Vargas served as President of Brazil, first as dictator, from 1930 to 1945, and in a democratically elected term from 1951 until his suicide in 1954. Vargas led Brazil for 18 years, the most for any President, and second in Brazilian history to Emperor Pedro II...
forced him out of the country. Unger continues to express deep admiration of his grandfather and has often noted the his influence.
When he was 11, Unger and his mother moved back to Brazil upon the death of his father. Unger attended Jesuit school where he learned to speak proper Portuguese, and went on to graduate from Rio law school in December 1969. He was admitted in September 1969 to Harvard Law School in anticipation of the successful completion of his exams. Having arrived too late for orientation, Harvard arranged special tutoring for late arrivals, which gave Unger the opportunity to get to know and debate the faculty.
With Brazil under a military dictatorship and Unger unable to return, Harvard invited him to stay for a second year and teach. At 23 years old, Unger began teaching first year contracts to first year students.
Academic career
In 1976, at 29 years old, Unger became one of the youngest faculty members to receive tenureTenure
Tenure commonly refers to life tenure in a job and specifically to a senior academic's contractual right not to have his or her position terminated without just cause.-19th century:...
from the Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
. In that same year, he also won a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
. Although appointed to the faculty of law, Unger often taught courses in social theory and philosophy. For his class "Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel" the dean once asked him to append "and the law." Unger recalled that, "I said no because of the code of honor that kept me from saying yes to a figure in authority. … And he just laughed and shrugged his shoulders, and that was that. Basically no Harvard Law School dean since then has ever asked me for anything."
The beginning of Unger's successful and influential career in academia began with his doctoral thesis, which was published as Law in Modern Society in 1976. Taking the likes of Marx and Weber as his conversationalists, he explored the origins of law in modern West and the pressures that were beginning to undermine contemporary legal arrangements. The key question it asked was why modern societies have legal systems with distinctions between institutions, such as legislature and court, and have a special caste of lawyers who have method of reasoning about social problems? Marx and Weber
Weber
Weber is a surname of German origin, derived from the noun meaning "weaver". In some cases, following migration to English-speaking countries, it has been anglicised to the English surname 'Webber' or even 'Weaver'.Notable people with the surname include:...
explained this as an economic necessity for the grounds of capitalist development. Unger argued that it was the result of political and cultural developments specific to Western Europe, and that there is no real basis of fact on their necessary integration. Similarly, his first book, Knowledge and Politics, published in 1975, took aim at liberal political philosophy, which he argued reduced the world to false antinomies—rules vs. values, reason vs. desire, etc.
These works led to the co-founding of Critical Legal Studies
Critical legal studies
Critical legal studies is a movement in legal thought that applied methods similar to those of critical theory to law. The abbreviations "CLS" and "Crit" are sometimes used to refer to the movement and its adherents....
(CLS) with Duncan Kennedy and Morton Horwitz
Morton Horwitz
Morton J. Horwitz is an American legal historian and law professor at Harvard Law School. The recent past dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan, relates that during her time at law school, students often nicknamed him as "Mort the Tort" since he taught the first-year subject Torts.Horwitz...
. The movement stirred up controversy in legal schools across America as it challenged standard legal scholarship and made radical proposals for legal education. By the early 1980s, the movement had hundred of adherents with annual events and conferences. A few years later, the CLS movement touched off a heated internal debate at Harvard, pitting the CLS scholars against the older, more traditional scholars. Despite later distancing himself from the movement when it took a turn in new directions, critics have said that Unger's social theory provides the only credible basis for CLS critique of ruling ideas of legal thought. Unger himself said that CLS's most significant legacy is to treat legal thought "as an inquiry into the possibilities of reconstruction" — a tool for devising better institutions.
Throughout much of the 1980s, Unger worked on his magnum opus, Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory, a three volume work on social change and alternative rivaling that of Marx. The series takes to the hilt the insight of society as an artifact, and smashes the idea of the necessity of certain institutional arrangements. The books are the natural outgrowth of his earlier work on law, extending the notion of the arbitrary social constructions of legal institutions to that of all of human activity. Published in 1987, Politics issues a devastating critique of contemporary social theory and politics, develops a profound and highly original theory of structural and ideological change, gives an alternative account of world history, and then works out the consequences in a vision for the future. By first tearing down the idea that there is a necessary progression from one set of institutional arrangements to another, e.g. feudalism to capitalism, and then building an anti-necessitarian theory of social change
False necessity
False necessity, or "anti-necessitarian social theory," is a contemporary social theory that champions the plasticity of society and the unlimited potential for transformation. It is foremost a critique of necessitarian thought in conventional social theory, which holds that parts of the social...
of how we get from one set of institutional arrangements to another, these works lay the basis for re-imagining the world and creating a viable alternative to the North Atlantic liberal democracies
Liberal democracy
Liberal democracy, also known as constitutional democracy, is a common form of representative democracy. According to the principles of liberal democracy, elections should be free and fair, and the political process should be competitive...
.
Unger has devoted much of the following decades to further elaborating on the insights developed in Politics through a working out of the political and social alternatives. What Should Legal Analysis Become? (Verso, 1996) developed tools to reimagine the organization of social life. Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative (Verso, 1998) and What Should the Left Propose? (Verso, 2005) put forth alternative institutional proposals.
In 2004, Unger was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
.
Early political activity
Unger has a long history of political activity in Latin America. With the end of the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 1970s, Unger began to return regularly to work with opposition groups. In 1978 he became the opposition party's chief of staff. He worked for six months in Brasilia uniting progressive liberals and the independent left. In 1979, he drafted the founding manifesto of the Party of the Brazilian Democratic MovementParty of the Brazilian Democratic Movement
The Brazilian Democratic Movement Party is the successor of the Brazilian Democratic Movement. It is a big tent party, including a range of politicians from conservatives as José Sarney to liberals as Pedro Simon, left-liberals as Roberto Requião, populists as Íris Resende, nationalists as Orestes...
, and a few years later, he returned to Brazil to direct a foundation for needy children in the country's burgeoning urban slums. He even ran an eight-week lightning campaign for a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, which he lost by a narrow margin.
In the late 1990s, along with Mexican political scientist Jorge Castañeda Gutman, Unger began to put together an informal network of politicians and business leaders dedicated to redrawing the political map. Dubbed the Latin American Alternative the thrust of the group was to provide viable proposals alongside the critic of neoliberalism
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is a market-driven approach to economic and social policy based on neoclassical theories of economics that emphasizes the efficiency of private enterprise, liberalized trade and relatively open markets, and therefore seeks to maximize the role of the private sector in determining the...
. They put forward proposals such as guaranteeing every citizen a "social right" to schooling and a job; breaking up media oligopolies; and holding town meetings to help citizens supervise municipal spending. Although Unger and Castañeda agree with others on the left who insist that the state must preserve a social safety net, they argue that money should be raised not through progressive taxes on income but through a value-added tax on consumption—this tax may increase the cost of living for some poor people, but it has the advantage of forcing the rich to actually pay it.
He has advised and discussed his ideas with numerous Latin American politicians and political candidates. He helped Leonel Brizola
Leonel Brizola
Leonel de Moura Brizola was a Brazilian politician. Launched in politics by Getúlio Vargas, Brizola was the only politician to serve as governor of two different states in the whole history of Brazil. In 1959 he was elected governor of Rio Grande do Sul, and in 1982 and 1990 he was elected...
, a two-time governor of Rio de Janeiro run for president twice, although unsuccessfully. Later, Unger also worked closely with another presidential candidate, Ciro Gomes
Ciro Gomes
Ciro Ferreira Gomes is a Brazilian lawyer and politician. He was a founding member of the then-center-left Brazilian Social Democracy Party , but left the party in 1996. He later moved to the Socialist People's Party and ran as the PPS' presidential candidate in 1998 and 2002...
. He similarly discussed implementing some of his ideas with Mexican politician Vicente Fox, first as governor of Guanajuato and then as president.
Brazilian government appointment
In June 2007, Unger was appointed as head of the newly established Long-term Planning Secretariat—part of the executive office of the president—in Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's second term. The appointment raised eyebrows, for in November 2005, Unger described Lula's government as "the most corrupt of Brazil's history" and called for his impeachment. Unger was also became responsible for the Institute of Applied Economic ResearchInstitute of Applied Economic Research
The Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada or Institute of Applied Economic Research is a Brazilian government-led research organization dedicated to generation of macroeconomical, sectorial and thematic studies in order to base government planning and policy making.It was created on 1964 and,...
, or IPEA, a government think tank
Think tank
A think tank is an organization that conducts research and engages in advocacy in areas such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, and technology issues. Most think tanks are non-profit organizations, which some countries such as the United States and Canada provide with tax...
previously attached to the Planning Ministry. Unger's nomination was reported to cause fear within the IPEA that he would politicize the institution, which has traditionally been seen as apolitical and independent, and it was even reported that he would disband a long-standing IPEA workgroup that had existed for thirty years.
On May 8, 2008 Lula designated Unger chief minister to coordinate the future of Amazon policy. This led to the resignation of the minister of environment in protest. Unger went on to sign a collaborative agreement with Russia.
On June 26, 2009, President Lula announced Unger would be leaving the government and returning to Harvard, which has a strict two-year limit for leaves of absence.
Policies in office
Unger's policy proposals in office remained true to his philosophy. He sees the future in small enterprises and supports a rotating capital fund that would function like a government run venture capital fund. He pushed for a rapid expansion of credit to smaller producers and a decentralized network of technical support centers that would help broaden the middle class from below. This is the enactment of Unger's theory of small scale flexible production that would be able to constantly revise and adjust its capacity and product, leaving more room for innovation and growth. Ultimately, this would lead to greater economic and social placticity.Specifically, Unger called for political solutions that would broaden access to production forces such as information technology, and for states to focus on equipping and monitoring civil society rather than trying to provide social services. He also advocated the weakening of strong executives by making branches of government mutually accountable to one another – the reduction in executive power, he said, would desirably "heighten the temperature of politics".
Legal thought
Unger's early work explored the connection between the law and the arrangement of social institutions. The guiding question of his work that served as a cornerstone for Critical Legal StudiesCritical legal studies
Critical legal studies is a movement in legal thought that applied methods similar to those of critical theory to law. The abbreviations "CLS" and "Crit" are sometimes used to refer to the movement and its adherents....
was why modern societies have legal system with distinctions between institutions, such as legislature and court, and have special caste of lawyers possessing a method of reasoning about social problems? And more so, why did these practices first emerge in Western Europe? Theorists such as Marx and Weber, not to mention the neoliberalist thinkers, had argued that this was a product of economic necessity to secure property rights and the autonomy of the individual. Unger rejected such a determinist explanation and went on to argue in Law and Modern Society that this system of private rights is not based on necessity, effectiveness, or moral superiority, but rather the result of a particular and contingent political and cultural development.
Unger identified three types of law, which fit into ideal types and satisfied conditions of legitimizing social order, reflecting the nature of social relations, and representing meaningful totality. These three types are customary law (characteristic of tribal societies), bureaucratic law (emergent in agrarian empires), and the liberal legal order of today (which is general, public, positive, and autonomous). It is this third type, the liberal legal order, that must be explained and not assumed.
Unger argued that in its development, the liberal legal order holds all equal before the law, thus stripping the ruler of any immunity. This led to a separation of powers and a practice in which rules are autonomous, not moral or religious. Likewise, institutions of the law are autonomous and legal reasoning adheres to the established set of rules rather than moral codes. Rather than any necessary connection between this set of legal codes and economic order, this legal thought and arrangements arose in Europe as a result of the indeterminate relations between monarchy, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie. It took the particular generality of form that it did from the long tradition of natural law
Natural law
Natural law, or the law of nature , is any system of law which is purportedly determined by nature, and thus universal. Classically, natural law refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature and deduce binding rules of moral behavior. Natural law is contrasted with the positive law Natural...
and universality.
Critique of social theory
Social theory for Unger has failed in its task to take the idea of society as artifact to the hilt. In Social Theory: Its Situation and its Task, Unger argues that modern social theory was born proclaiming that society is made and imagined and not the expression of an underlying natural order, but at the same time its capacity was checked by the equally prevalent ambition to create law-like explanations of history and social development. The human science that developed claimed to identify a small number of possible types of social organization that coexisted or succeeded on another through inescapable developmental tendencies or deep-seated economic economic, organization, or psychological constraints. Marxism is the star example.Conventional social science and the theories that it has left us with today fall into one of two types: deep-structure social theory and positive social science. The former make a distinction between routine practices and the underlying institutional contexts that shape those practices. At the same time, however, this type of social theory couples this distinction with indivisible types of social organization and deep seated constraints and developmental laws. As such, the possibilities of human social development is limited and constrained. The latter practice of positive social science refuses to take the distinction between formative context and formed routines as the central practice of social and historical explanation, but rather sees society and history as an endless series of episodes of problem solving. What this has led to is either the social sciences adhering to a script of history or social organization, or forsaking any attempt at explanation in favor of just detailing conflict and resolution.
Unger thus sees that the state of the social sciences and humanities today have succumbed to the sway of three impulses that stagnate their development and curtail their transformative power. These are the rationalizing, humanizing, and escapist impulses.
- Rationalization: contemporary social scientists rationalize the present social order as a natural state of arrangements and see it as the victor of a competition with failed alternatives. In practice, social scientists merely explain why the current institutional landscape is the way it is, without recognizing that the social arrangements under exploration are the product of a particular historical time and place. The laws that they generate, therefore, cannot be universal laws for human societies, for once the institutional context changes these "laws" will no longer be valid.
- Humanization: political and legal thought today operates on the premise that we cannot change society fundamentally and thus should only strive to make humanely better an imperfect world. Rather than restructuring the foundations that cause inequality and insecurity, those that aim to humanize the world advocate compensatory transfers of wealth by governments to attenuate the inequalities and insecurities of the market economy. For Unger, those political and legal theorists that limit themselves to only humanizing the present order suffer from “the poverty of the imagination of structural change” and the false view that we must choose between humanization (reform at the edges) and revolution (the substitution of one whole system for another). In response, Unger argues that one need not choose between revolution and humanization because societies are not “indivisible systems, standing or falling together” and thus we can bring about their piecemeal reconstruction.
- Escapism merely describes and explores adventures in consciousness, which bear no relation to confronting the problems of and remaking the social order. Escapists focus on spiritual adventurism while giving up on the institutions and practices of society. In response, Unger argues that some structures are more inviting to change than others, and that one is mistaken to pessimistically believe in a universal maxim that all structures are unchangeable enemies to our transcendent spirits.
Politics: Work in constructive social theory
Having made this critique of social theory, Unger's key task was to reconstruct social theory in a way that would avoid the shortcomings of conventional deep structure social theory and the positive social sciences, and provide a way of understanding discontinuous change. The task of such a social theory was to carry the idea of society as artifact to the hilt.In this effort of constructive social theory Unger began by formulating the theory of false necessity
False necessity
False necessity, or "anti-necessitarian social theory," is a contemporary social theory that champions the plasticity of society and the unlimited potential for transformation. It is foremost a critique of necessitarian thought in conventional social theory, which holds that parts of the social...
, which claims that our social worlds are the artifact of our own human endeavors. There is no pre-set institutional arrangement that our societies adhere to, and there is no necessary historical mold of development that they will follow. Rather we are free to choose and develop the forms and the paths that our societies will take through a process of conflicts and resolutions. However, there are groups of institutional arrangements that work together to bring out certain institutional forms, liberal democracy, for example. These forms are the basis of a social structure, and which Unger calls formative context
Formative Context
Formative contexts are the institutional and imaginative arrangements that shape a society's conflicts and resolutions. They are the structures that limit both the practice and the imaginative possibilities in a socio-political order, and in doing so shape the routines of conflict over social,...
. In order to explain how we move from one formative context to another without the conventional social theory constraints of historical necessity (e.g. feudalism to capitalism), and to do so while remaining true to the key insight of individual human empowerment and anti-necessitarian social thought, Unger recognized that there are an infinite number of ways of resisting social and institutional constraints, which can lead to an infinite number of outcomes. This variety of forms of resistance and empowerment
Empowered democracy
Empowered democracy is an alternative form of social-democratic arrangements developed by philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Theorized in response to the repressiveness and rigidity of contemporary liberal democratic society, the theory of empowered democracy envisions a more open...
make change possible. Unger calls this empowerment negative capability
Negative Capability
Negative capability is the ability to perceive and to think more than any presupposition of human nature allows. It describes the capacity of human beings to reject the totalizing constraints of a closed context, and to both experience phenomenon free from any epistemological bounds as well as to...
.
Programmatic Thought
We cannot revise the institutions the contain us unless we first imagine how they could be otherwise. Thus, we must have a programor give up the radical program altogether—that is, we must engage in programmatic thought. In building this program, however, we must not entertain complete revolutionary overhaul, lest we be plagued by three false assumptions:- Typological Fallacy: the fallacy that there is closed list of institutional alternatives in history, such as ‘feudalismFeudalismFeudalism was a set of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries, which, broadly defined, was a system for ordering society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.Although derived from the...
’ or ‘capitalismCapitalismCapitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
’. There is not a natural form of society, only the specific result of the piecemeal institutional changes, political movements, and cultural reforms (as well as the accidents and coincidences of history) that came before it. - Indivisibility Fallacy: most subscribers to revolutionary Leftism wrongly believe that institutional structures must stand and fall together. However, structures can be reformed piecemeal.
- Determinism Fallacy: the fallacy that uncontrollable and little understood law-like forces drive the historical succession of institutional systems. However, there is no natural flow of history. We make ourselves and our world, and can do so in any way we choose.
To think about social transformation programmatically, one must first mark the direction one wants society to move in, and then identify the first steps with which we can move in that direction. In this way we can formulate proposals at points along the trajectory, be they relatively close to how things are now or relatively far away. This provides a third way between revolution and reform. It is revolutionary reform, where one has a revolutionary vision, but acts on that vision in a sequence of piecemeal reforms. As Unger puts it, transformative politics is "not about blueprints; it is about pathways. It is not architecture; it is music."
Empowered democracy
Empowered democracyEmpowered democracy
Empowered democracy is an alternative form of social-democratic arrangements developed by philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Theorized in response to the repressiveness and rigidity of contemporary liberal democratic society, the theory of empowered democracy envisions a more open...
is Unger's vision of a more open and more plastic set of social institutions through which individuals and groups can interact, propose change, and effectively empower themselves to transform social, economic, and political structures. The key strategy is to combine freedom of commerce and governance at the local level with the ability of political parties at the central government level to promote radical social experiments that would bring about decisive change in social and political institutions.
In practice, the theory would involve radical developments in politics at the center, as well as social innovation in localities. At the center, by bestowing wide ranging revisionary powers to those in office, it would give political parties the ability to try out concrete yet profound solutions and proposals. It would turn partisan conflicts over control and uses of governmental power into an opportunity to question and revise the basic arrangements of social life through a rapid resolution of political impasse. In local communities, empowered democracy would make capital and technology available through rotating capital funds, which would encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. Citizens rights include individual entitlements to economic and civic security, conditional and temporary group claims to portions of social capital, and destabilization rights, which would empower individuals or groups to disrupt organizations and practices marred by routines of subjugation that normal politics have failed to disrupt.
Political thought
Unger sees two main Lefts in the world today, a recalcitrant Left and a humanizing Left. The recalcitrant Left seeks to slow down the march of markets and globalizationGlobalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
, and to return to a time of greater government involvement and stronger social programs. The humanizing (or ‘reformist’) Left accepts the world in its present form, taking the market economy and globalization as unavoidable, and attempts to humanize their effects through tax-and-transfer policies
Transfer payment
In economics, a transfer payment is a redistribution of income in the market system. These payments are considered to be exhaustive because they do not directly absorb resources or create output...
.
Unger finds the two major orientations of contemporary Leftism inadequate and calls for a ‘Reconstructive Left’ – one that would insist on redirecting the course of globalization by reorganizing the market economy. In his two books The Left Alternative and The Future of American Progressivism, Unger lays out program to democratize the market economy and deepen democracy. This Reconstructive Left would look beyond debates on the appropriate size of government, and instead re-envision the relationship between government and firms in the market economy by experimenting with the coexistence of different regimes of private and social property. It would, like the recalcitrant and humanizing Left, be committed to social solidarity, but “would refuse to allow our moral interests in social cohesion [to] rest solely upon money transfers commanded by the state in the form of compensatory and retrospective redistribution,” as is the case with federal entitlement programs. Instead, Unger’s Reconstructive Left affirms “the principle that everyone should share, in some way and at some time, responsibility for taking care of other people.”
Unger has laid out concrete policy proposals in areas of economic development, education, civil society, and political democracy.
- On economic development, Unger has noted that there are only two models for a national economy available to us today: the US model of business control of government, and the northeast Asian model of top down bureaucratic control of the economy. Citing the need for greater imagination on the issue, he has offered a third model that is decentralized, pluralistic, participatory, and experimental. This would take the form of an economy encouraging small business development and innovation that would create large scale self employment and cooperation. The emphasis is on the protection of big business as the main sectors of the economy, but the highly mobile and innovative small firm.
- Unger links the development of such an economy to an education system that encourages creativity and empowers the mind, not one that he now sees geared for a reproduction of the family and to put the individual in service of the state. He proposes that such a system should be run locally but have standards enforced through national oversight, as well as a procedure in place to intervene in the case of the failing of local systems.
- Unger's critique of and alternative to social programs goes to the heart of civil society. The problem we are faced with now, he claims, is that we have a bureaucratic system of distribution that provides lower quality service and prohibits the involvement of civil society in the provision of public services. The alternative he lays out is to have the state act to equip civil society to partake in public services and care. This would entail empowering each individual to have two responsibilities, one in the productive economy and one in the caring economy.
- Unger's proposal for political democracy calls for a high energy system that diminishes the dependence of change upon crisis. This can be done, he claims, by breaking the constant threat of stasis and institutionalization of politics and parties through five institutional innovations. First, increase collective engagement through the public financing of campaigns and giving free access to media outlets. Second, hasten the pace of politics by breaking legislative deadlock though the enabling of the party in power to push through proposals and reforms, and for opposition parties to be able to dissolve the government and call for immediate elections. Third, the option of any segment of society to opt out of the political process and to propose alternative solutions for its own governance. Fourth, give the state the power to rescue oppressed groups that are unable to liberate themselves through collective action. Fifth, direct participatory democracy in which active engagement is not purely in terms of financial support and wealth distribution, but through which people are directly involved in their local and national affairs through proposal and action.
Transformative vocation
Unger argues that there are three ideas about work in society: work as honorable calling, work as instrumental, and work as transformative vocation. Work as honorable calling is the idea that “labor enables the individual…to support the family that provides him with his most important sustaining relations.” Your job provides you with dignity, proves you have proficiency and experience in some area of society, and indicates that you are neither shifting, dependent nor useless.The instrumental conception of work is the idea that work “lacks any intrinsic authority” nor “any power of its own to confer dignity or direction on a human life.” Unger argues that to conceive of one’s workaday activity in this manner is to “view the social world as utterly oppressive or alien.” To Unger, those who see work this way are denied any sense of belonging to the world.
The final conception of work – one that Unger argues is turning things inside out – connects self-fulfillment and transformation. In this conception, one’s work is a struggle against the defects or the limits of existing society or available knowledge. Those with such ‘transformative vocations’ find that “self-fulfillment and service to society combine” and “resistance becomes the price of salvation.” Unger argues that the idea of transformative vocation is an insurgent, growing ideas in the world, waging “a largely mute spiritual struggle against the other two notions of work.”
The core conception
At the core of Unger's philosophy are two key conceptions: the infinity of the individual, and singularity of the world and reality of time. The premise behind the infinity of the individual is the idea that we must exist within social contexts but that we are more than the roles that these contexts may define for us—we can overcome them. In Unger's terms, we are both "context-bound and context-transcending;" we appear as "the embodied spirit;" as "the infinite imprisoned within the finite." For Unger, there is no natural state of the individual and his social being. Rather, instead we are unbound in what we can be become; we are infinite in spirit. As such, no social institution or convention can contain us. While institutions do exist and shape our beings and our interactions, we can change both their structure and the extent to which they imprison us.The philosophy of the singularity of the world and reality of time establishes history as the site of decisive action through the propositions that there is only one true world, not multiple or simultaneous universes, and that time really exists in the world, not as a simulacrum through which we must experience the world. These ideas put Kant and his legacy on trial, and reaffirm the openness of the future through insight into "the actual and imagination into the possible."
These two concepts of infinity and reality lie at the heart of Unger's program calling for metaphysical and institutional revolutions. To insist on the embodiment of spirit in the world the routines that it cannot penetrate or transform must be broken, which can only be done by changing our social institutions in wholly new ways that leave open all possibilities and allow experimentalism in life and social structures. To see the individual as context transcending means that the we must be able to recreate our context, which can only be done in a singular world within which time is real.
The self and human nature
In Passion: An Essay on Personality, Unger explores the individual and his relation to society from the perspective of the root human predicament of the need to establish oneself as a unique individual in the world but at the same time to find commonality and solidarity with others. This exploration is grounded in what Unger calls a modernist image of the human being as one who lives in context but is not bound by context.Unger’s aim is twofold. First, to level a critique, expansion, and defense of modern thinking about the human and society “so that this practice can better withstand the criticisms that philosophy since Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
and Kant
KANT
KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...
has leveled against it.” And second, to develop a prescriptive theory of human identity centered around what Unger calls the passions
Passions (philosophy)
Passion, or the passions, is a philosophical concept. It is different from popular connotations of passion, which are associated with notions of romance, and which is generally seen as a positive emotion. The philosophical notion, in contrast, is identified with an innate or biologically driven...
—our raw responses to the world that are ambivalent towards reasons but also act in the service of reason. He outlines nine passions that organize and are organized by our dealings with others: lust, despair, hatred, vanity, jealousy, envy, faith, hope, and love. While these emotional states may be seen as raw emotion, their expression is always conditioned by the context within which the individual mobilizes or learns to mobilize them.
Religion and the human condition
Unger has written and spoken extensively on religionReligion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
and the human condition
Human condition
The human condition encompasses the experiences of being human in a social, cultural, and personal context. It can be described as the irreducible part of humanity that is inherent and not connected to gender, race, class, etc. — a search for purpose, sense of curiosity, the inevitability of...
. Religion, Unger argues, is a vision of the world within which we anchor our orientation to life. It is within this orientation that we deal with our greatest terrors and highest hopes. Because we are doomed to die, we hope for eternal life; because we are unable to grasps to totality of existence or of the universe, we try to dispel the mystery and provide a comprehensible explanation; because we have an insatiable desire, we cry for an object that is worthy of this desire, one that is infinite. Humans initially invested religious discourse in nature and the human susceptibility to nature. But as societies evolved and people developed ways to cope with the unpredictability of nature, the emphasis of religion shifted to social existence and its defects. A new moment in religion will begin, Unger argues, when we stop telling ourselves that all will be fine and we begin to face the incorrigible flaws in human existence. The future of religion lies in embracing our mortality and our groundlessness.
Unger see four flaws in the human condition. They are, our mortality and the facing of imminent death; our groundlessness in that we are unable to grasp the solution to the enigma of existence, see the beginning or end of time, nor put off the discovery of the meaning of life; our insatiability in that we always want more, and demand the infinite from the finite; and our susceptibility to belittlement which places us in a position to constantly confront petty routine forcing us to die many little deaths.
There are three major responses in the history of human thought to these flaws: escape, humanization, and confrontation.
- The overcoming of the world denies the phenomenal world and its distinctions, including the individual. It proclaims a benevolence towards others and an indifference to suffering and change. One achieves serenity by becoming invulnerable to suffering and change. The religion of BuddhismBuddhismBuddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
and philosophical thought of PlatoPlatoPlato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
and Schopenhauer best represent this orientation. - The humanization of the world creates meaning out of social interactions in a meaningless world by placing all emphasis on our reciprocal responsibility to one another. ConfucianismConfucianismConfucianism is a Chinese ethical and philosophical system developed from the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius . Confucianism originated as an "ethical-sociopolitical teaching" during the Spring and Autumn Period, but later developed metaphysical and cosmological elements in the Han...
and contemporary liberalism represent this strand of thought, both of which aim to soften the cruelties of the world. - The struggle with the world is framed by the idea that series of personal and social transformations can increase our share of attributes associated with the divine and give us a larger life. It emphasizes love over altruism, rejecting the moral of the mastery of self interest to enhance solidarity, and emphasizing the humility of individual love. This orientation has been articulated in two different voices: the sacred voice of JudaismJudaismJudaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
, ChristianityChristianityChristianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
, and IslamIslamIslam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
, and the profane voice of the secular projects of liberation.
The religion of the future
The spiritual orientation of the struggle with the world has given rise to the secular movements of emancipation in the modern world, and it is here that Unger sees the religion of the future. The problem Unger sees, however, is that as an established religion, this orientation has betrayed its ideological underpinnings and has made peace with existing order. It has accepted the hierarchies of class structure in society, accepted the transfer of money as serving as the basis of solidarity, and reaffirmed the basis of existing political, economic, and social institutions by investing in a conservative position of their preservation. Thus, "to be faithful to what made this orientation persuasive and powerful in the first place, we must radicalize it against both established institutions and dominant beliefs."Unger's call is for a revolution in our religious beliefs that encompasses both individual transformation and institutional reorganization; to create change in the life of the individual as well as in the organization of society. The first part of the program of individual transformation means waking from the dazed state in which we live our lives, and recognizing our mortality and groundlessness without turning to the feel good theologies and philosophies. The second part of the program of social transformation means supplementing the metaphysical revolution with institutional practices by creating social institutions that allow us to constantly overthrow our constraints and our context, and to make this overthrow not a one time event but a continuing process. This is the program of empowered democracy
Empowered democracy
Empowered democracy is an alternative form of social-democratic arrangements developed by philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Theorized in response to the repressiveness and rigidity of contemporary liberal democratic society, the theory of empowered democracy envisions a more open...
that calls for reforms in the market economy, eduction, politics, and civil society. "The goal is not to humanize society but to divinize humanity." It is "to raise ordinary life to a higher level of intensity and capability."
The singularity of the world and the reality of time
Unger's philosophy of space and time argues for the singularity of the world and the reality of time. His arguments take on the idea of the independent observer standing outside of time and space of Issac Newton, address the skepticismSkepticism
Skepticism has many definitions, but generally refers to any questioning attitude towards knowledge, facts, or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, or doubt regarding claims that are taken for granted elsewhere...
of David Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
, reject the position of Kant
KANT
KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...
, and attack the speculations about parallel universes
Many-worlds interpretation
The many-worlds interpretation is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts the objective reality of the universal wavefunction, but denies the actuality of wavefunction collapse. Many-worlds implies that all possible alternative histories and futures are real, each representing an...
of contemporary cosmology
Cosmology
Cosmology is the discipline that deals with the nature of the Universe as a whole. Cosmologists seek to understand the origin, evolution, structure, and ultimate fate of the Universe at large, as well as the natural laws that keep it in order...
. At stake is the laying of the foundations for a view of the world and causality that is open to all possibilities; that is not a closed system of options in which our future is governed by deterministic laws and typologies. It is an understanding of society that rejects the naturalness and necessity of current social arrangements; "a form of understanding of society and history that refuses to explain the present arrangements in a manner that vindicates their naturalness and necessity."
The thesis of the singularity of the world states that there is one real world. Such a thesis stands in stark contrast to contemporary theoretical physics
Theoretical physics
Theoretical physics is a branch of physics which employs mathematical models and abstractions of physics to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena...
and cosmology, which speculate about multiple universes out of the dilemma of how to have law like explanations if the universe is unique--laws will be universal because they don't just apply to this unique universe but to all universes. However, there is no empirical evidence for multiple worlds. Unger's singularity thesis can better address our empirical observations and set the conceptual platform to address the four main puzzles in cosmology today: big bang
Big Bang
The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model that explains the early development of the Universe. According to the Big Bang theory, the Universe was once in an extremely hot and dense state which expanded rapidly. This rapid expansion caused the young Universe to cool and resulted in...
, initial conditions, horizon problem
Horizon problem
The horizon problem is a problem with the standard cosmological model of the Big Bang which was identified in the 1970s. It points out that different regions of the universe have not "contacted" each other because of the great distances between them, but nevertheless they have the same temperature...
, and the precise value of constants, such as gravity, speed of light
Speed of light
The speed of light in vacuum, usually denoted by c, is a physical constant important in many areas of physics. Its value is 299,792,458 metres per second, a figure that is exact since the length of the metre is defined from this constant and the international standard for time...
, and Planck's constant.
The thesis that time is real states that time really is real and everything is subject to history. This move is to historicize everything, even the laws of nature, and to challenge our acting as if time were real but not too real--we act as if it is somewhat real otherwise there would be no causal relations, but not so real that laws change. Unger holds that time is so real that laws of nature are also subject to its force and they too must change. There are no eternal laws upon which change occurs, rather time precedes structure. This position gives the universe a history and makes time non-emergent, global, irreversible, and continuous.
Bringing these two thesis together, Unger theorizes that laws of nature develop together with the phenomenon they explain. Laws and initial conditions co-evolve, in the same that they do in how cells reproduce and mutate in different levels of complexity of organisms. In cosmological terms Unger explains the passing from one structure to another at the origins of the universe when the state of energy was high but not infinite, and the freedom of movement was greater than when operating under a known set of laws. The conditions of the early universe is compatible with the universe that preceded it. The new universe may be different in structure, but has been made with what existed in the old one, e.g. masses of elementary particles, strength of different forces, and cosmologigcal constants. As the universe cools the phenomena and laws work together with materials produced by sequence; they are path dependent materials. They are also constrained by the family of resemblances of the effective laws against the background of the conceptions of alternative states the universe and succession of universes.
Mathematics and the one real, time-drenched world
One consequence of these positions that Unger points to is the revision of the concept and function mathematics. If there is only one world drenched in time through and through, then mathematics cannot be a timeless expression of multiple universes that captures reality. Rather, Unger argues that mathematics is a means of analyzing the world removed of time and phenomenal distinction. By emptying the world of time and space it is able to better focus on one aspect of reality: the recurrence of certain ways in which pieces of the world relate to other pieces. Its subject matter are the structured wholes and bundles of relations, which we see outside mathematics only as embodied in the time-bound particulars of the manifest world. In this way, mathematics extends our problem solving powers as an extension of human insight, but it is not a part of the world.Criticism and Reception
In 1987 the Northwestern University Law Review devoted an entire issue to Unger's work, hailing the appearance of his three volume magnus opus Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory as "an important intellectual event." Michael J. Perry, a professor of law at Northwestern, commended Unger for producing a vast work of social theory that dared to combine law, history, politics, and philosophy within a single, sweeping narrative. In the years since, Cornel West, Perry Anderson, Richard Rorty, and numerous other prominent scholars have published detailed—and, very often, admiring—essays on Unger's project.Early reviewers of Politics questioned Unger's seeming predicament of criticizing a system of thought and its historical tradition without subjecting himself to the same critical gaze. "There is little acknowledgment that he himself is writing in a particular socio-historical context," wrote one reviewer, and another asked, "in what context Unger himself is situated and why that context itself is not offered up to the sledgehammer." Such criticism has largely been answered by Unger with his enumeration of the revolutionary orthodoxy and his outline of world history.
Critics also balked at the lack of example or concrete vision of his social and political proposals. As one critic wrote, "it is difficult to imagine what Unger's argument would mean in practice," and that "he does not tell us what to make." Others have pointed out that the lack of imagination of such readers is precisely what is at stake, while Unger has since answered such criticism with works on social, political, and economic alternatives.
Writing style
Unger writes with a mix of social theory excess and everyday bluntness, which has overwhelmed some readers. In a telling anecdote, The London Review of Books returned to Unger a solicited piece on the new agenda for the left saying that it was "insufficiently conversational." Unger responded with a note that read, "even in conversation my style would never be considered conversational."Reviewers of Unger's books have found his writing style philosophically dense and explanations voluminous. One reviewer termed his political thought "a staged exercise in political mystique." However, Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University...
and others lavished praise for such poetics, comparing Unger to Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
, and Unger's most recent book, The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound, provides more accessible and condensed access to his thought.
See also
- False necessityFalse necessityFalse necessity, or "anti-necessitarian social theory," is a contemporary social theory that champions the plasticity of society and the unlimited potential for transformation. It is foremost a critique of necessitarian thought in conventional social theory, which holds that parts of the social...
- Formative contextFormative ContextFormative contexts are the institutional and imaginative arrangements that shape a society's conflicts and resolutions. They are the structures that limit both the practice and the imaginative possibilities in a socio-political order, and in doing so shape the routines of conflict over social,...
- Negative capabilityNegative CapabilityNegative capability is the ability to perceive and to think more than any presupposition of human nature allows. It describes the capacity of human beings to reject the totalizing constraints of a closed context, and to both experience phenomenon free from any epistemological bounds as well as to...
- Empowered democracyEmpowered democracyEmpowered democracy is an alternative form of social-democratic arrangements developed by philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Theorized in response to the repressiveness and rigidity of contemporary liberal democratic society, the theory of empowered democracy envisions a more open...
- Structure and agency
- Passions
Books
- Knowledge and Politics, Free Press, 1975.
- Law in Modern Society, Free Press, 1976.
- Passion: An Essay on PersonalityPassion: An Essay on PersonalityPassion: An Essay on Personality is a philosophical inquiry into human nature by philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Published in 1986 by the Free Press, the book explores the individual and his relation to society from the perspective of the root human predicament of the need to...
, Free Press, 1986. - The Critical Legal Studies Movement, Harvard University Press, 1986.
- Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory, Cambridge University Press, 1987, in 3 Vols:
- Vol 1 - False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy.
- Vol 2 - Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task - A Critical Introduction to Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory.
- Vol 3 - Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success.
- What Should Legal Analysis Become?, Verso, 1996
- Politics: The Central Texts, Theory Against Fate, Verso, 1997, with Cui ZhiyuanCui ZhiyuanCui Zhiyuan , born in Beijing in 1963, is a professor at Tsinghua University's School of Public Policy and Management, Beijing. His father was a nuclear engineer in Sichuan province....
. - Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative, Verso, 1998.
- The Future of American Progressivism: An Initiative for Political and Economic Reform, Beacon, 1998 - with Cornel WestCornel WestCornel Ronald West is an American philosopher, author, critic, actor, civil rights activist and prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America....
- What Should the Left Propose?, Verso, 2006.
- The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound, Harvard, 2007.
- Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics, Princeton University Press, 2007.
- The Left Alternative, Verso, 2009 (2nd edition to What Should the Left Propose?, Verso, 2006.).
External links
Biographical Articles about Roberto Unger:
- Guggenheim Gives Fellowships for '76: Unger Gets Tenure, Too (The Harvard Crimson April 5, 1976)
- Guggenheim Fellows for 1976 (Guggenheim Foundation Website)
- "The Passion of Roberto Unger" , Eyal Press, (Lingua Franca, March 1999)
- Carlos Castilho, "Brazil's Consigliere: Unger Leaves Lectern to Stand Behind the Throne." (World Paper, April 2000)
- Simon Romero, "Destination: São Paulo" (Metropolis, October 2000) This article is about São Paulo, Brazil, but it has a lengthy discussion of Unger's political activism there and many quotes from Unger.
- Meltzer Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences (HLS News May 13, 2004)