Roberto Mangabeira Unger (b. March 24, 1947, Rio de Janeiro) is a philosopher and Brazilian politician. He is the author of nearly two dozen books in social, political, legal, and economic theory, and philosophy. His work has sought to understand and change the structure of contemporary societies in ways that do not vindicate their necessity, but on the contrary inform the imagination of alternatives. His work in legal theory helped disrupt the methodological consensus in legal thought and transform contemporary legal theory.[1] His writings in philosophy have been critically hailed as successfully grappling with some of the most fundamental and enduring problems of human existence,[2] and have been put into direct dialogue with Kant and Hume.[3][4] His work in social, political, and economic theory have been widely praised,[5][6][7] and even compared to Dante and Milton.[8][9] This intellectual activity serves as the basis for Unger's direct political engagement in Brazil and Latin America.
Unger has taught at the Harvard Law School for all of his adult life. He became the youngest tenured faculty at the law school in 1976, and has since instructed many of the world elite, including Barack Obama, who took Jurisprudence and Reinventing Democracy with Unger.[10][11] He offers classes only in the spring semester on subjects covering everything from the history of religious thought to programmatic solutions to the present day economic crisis.[12]
At the center of Unger's thought is the intellectual devotion to carrying the revolutionary ideas of modern social theory beyond the limitations of his predecessors. Although modernist projects, such as neo-liberalism and Marxism, saw society as a creation of the human imagination and not of an underlying natural order, they failed to carry this idea to its natural conclusion: that all social arrangements are political and social theory is not beholden to social typologies or necessitarian developments. Unger sees these movements to have turned to narrowly framed explanations for narrowly described phenomena.[13] To fully realize the liberation of humanity from the constraints of social hierarchy and the degradation of economic enslavement, and to actuate the ideals of empowered democracy and individual freedom, Unger's work attempts to rethink these projects by bringing "insight into the actual and imagination into the possible."[14] He has put forth bold institutional alternatives in the realms of politics, civil society, and the market.
Unger has long been active in Brazilian oppositional politics, where he has attempted to realize his political ideals. He was one of the founding members of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party and drafted its founding manifesto.[15] He directed the presidential campaigns of Leonel Brizola and Ciro Gomes, ran for the Chamber of Deputies, and launched exploratory bids for his own presidential campaigns. He served as the Minister of Strategic Affairs in the second Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration. He is currently working in the Brazilian state of Rondônia on social and developmental projects.
Unger with his maternal grandparents, Esther e Octávio Mangabeira
Unger's maternal grandfather, Octávio Mangabeira, was the last of eight children of Augusta Mangabeira and Francisco Cavalcanti Mangabeira, a poor pharmacist living in the Brazilian state of Bahia. Octávio's brother João Mangabeira founded the Brazilian Socialist Party. His sister Maria Mangabeira founded a religious order. Octávio became professor of astronomy at the Escola Politécnic in Bahia and gained popularity after delivering an inspired public lecture in 1910 on Halley's Comet, which propelled him into a career in politics. He went on to serve as Brazil's minister of foreign affairs in the late 1920s before the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas subjected him to a series of imprisonments and exiles in Europe and the United States. After returning to Brazil in 1945, he was elected as a representative in the Câmara Federal in 1946, governor of Bahia in 1947, and Senator in 1958.[16]
Both of Unger's parents were accomplished intellectuals. His Dresden-born father, Artur Unger, arrived in the United States as a child and became a naturalized citizen. He went on to a career as a lawyer. His mother, Edyla Mangabeira, was a Brazilian poet and journalist. She published numerous books of her poetry, and a memoir of her experiences in social activism in Brazil entitled O Sertao do Velho Chica (The backlands of the old Chico). Her journalism appeared in many of Brazil's major news publications. Artur and Edyla met at a party in the US during the exile of Octávio Mangabeira.[17]
Unger as a child dressed as a Scotsman
Roberto Mangabeira Unger was born in Rio de Janeiro on March 24, 1947. Although his parents lived in the United States at the time, his father suffered a heart attack during a family visit to Brazil, which delayed their return to the United States and led to the birth of Roberto 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. He went to Brazil during vacations, where he stayed with his grandfather, Ocavio Mangabeira. Unger cities these summers with his grandfather as influencing his conception of political life.
When Unger was 7, his mother began reading to him Benjamin Jowett's translation of Plato's Republic an experience he cites as the origin of his interest in speculative thought. When he was 11, his father died and Unger and his mother moved back to Brazil. 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 the summer orientation on American law for international students, Unger and the other late arrivals were given a weekly seminar, which provided a forum for Unger to engage the faculty and their different specialties.
After the completion of his LLM, Unger stayed at Harvard another year on a fellowship. During this time, activist tensions with the Brazilian military government intensified, and between his sister's arrest during protests and his own misgivings about the police state, he opted not to return. Harvard invited him to stay in the doctoral program and teach. At 23 years old, Unger began teaching first year contracts to first year students.[17]
In 1976, at 29 years old, Unger became one of the youngest faculty members to receive tenure from the Harvard Law School. In that same year, he also won a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship.[18] 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."[17]
The beginning of Unger's successful and influential career in academia began with the books Knowledge and Politics and Law in Modern Society, published in 1975 and 1976 respectively.[19][20] These works offer an analysis and criticism of the legal, political, moral, and epistemological assumptions that underlie much of modern thought. Knowledge and Politics took aim at liberal political philosophy, which he argued reduced the world to false antinomies—rules vs. values, reason vs. desire, etc. Law in Modern Society explored the origins of law in the modern West and argued that there is no relation between legal, political, and economic arrangements, as is often assumed.
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.[1] 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.[21] Unger himself said that CLS's most significant legacy is to treat legal thought "as an inquiry into the possibilities of reconstruction," that is, a tool for devising better institutions.[17]
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.
Unger's model of philosophical practice is closest to those philosophers who sought to form a view of the whole of reality and to do so by using and resisting the specialized knowledge of their time. It can be read as a radicalized pragmatism, but also as an attempt to disengage ideas and experiences that developed in the West under the influence of Christianity from the categories of Greek philosophy.[22] His thought also has affinities with the philosophy of Henri Bergson, especially his thinking on time. It engages almost always implicitly the philosophy of Hegel, who Unger cites as having added to the "ambition of world-wide understanding the principle of historical consciousness." However, Unger's thought, unlike Hegel's, repudiates the ideas of a predetermined evolution of the spirit and of a definitive resting place. It reflects the lineages of romanticism and existentialism as powerful voices of the struggle with the world, but rejects the romantic and existentialist idea that we can be fully human only by waging war against structure, routine, and repetition—a war that the romantic and the existentialist believes we are doomed to lose. His thought is in some senses the inverse of Schopenhauer's philosophy, affirming as it does the supreme value of life and the reality and depth of the self and eschewing willnessness. It turns away from Nietzsche's beating of the drums in the presence of death, regarding this desperate triumphalism as a misdirection and a misunderstanding of who we are and of what we can become.[23]
Two sets of intellectual influences combine with those of the history of Western philosophy. One is classical social theory, and especially the social theory of Karl Marx, taken as the most accomplished example of the insights and illusions of that theoretical tradition. The other is the European novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, viewed as a source of insight into our experience and self-understanding.
Lecturing in Hauser Hall, Harvard Law School
[edit] 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 classical 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 one another through inescapable developmental tendencies or deep-seated economic organization or psychological constraints. Marxism is the star example.[13]
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, deep-structure 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 simply forsaking any attempt at explanation in favor of just detailing conflict and resolution.[24]
[edit] False Necessity
Having made this critique of social theory, Unger's key task was to reconstruct social theory in a way that would resist the typologies and the necessitarian nature of conventional deep-structure social theory, and to avoid the failure of the positive social sciences to explain the world. His goal was to provide a theory of discontinuous change and to carry the idea of society as artifact to the hilt.[13]
Unger began by formulating the theory of false necessity, which claims that social worlds are the artifact of human endeavors. There is no pre-set institutional arrangement that societies must adhere to, and there is no necessary historical mold of development that they will follow. Rather, we are free to choose and to create the forms and the paths that our societies will take. However, this does not give license to absolute contingency. Rather, Unger finds that there are groups of institutional arrangements that work together to bring about certain institutional forms—liberal democracy, for example. These forms are the basis of a social structure, 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. Unger is clear to add, however, that these outcomes are always reliant on the forms from which they spring. The new world is built upon the existing one.[25]
[edit] Placticity into Power
In the third volume of Politics, Placticity into Power: Comparative-historical studies on the institutional conditions of economic and military success, Unger provides the historical materials he drew on to formulate the theory developed in first two volumes. Three key puzzles in the history of human societies frame the discussion. The first puzzle is how some societies found solutions to avoid the constant plague of reversion from a monetary economy back to a natural economy, and how Europe was able to create the conditions that forever closed off this reversion. The second puzzle is the protection problem, or how societies created the means to use wealth to pay for violence, as well as how they employed violence to garner wealth. The third puzzle is how some societies were able to achieve military superiority.[26]
Strung throughout the discussion of these three puzzles, and at the heart of the argument of the book, is that there is no singular or necessary path of social, economic, or military development. The means by which Western European societies garnered economic and military advantages over the rest of the world occurred through the haphazard and contingent organization and activities of some sectors of society, not through a given set of necessary and sufficient conditions.
Thus, in answer to the first puzzle, Unger shows that Western Europe broke through the reversion cycle because the elites were fragmented and an independent class of producers could flourish freely enabling industrial innovation and protodemocratic development. Key here was the lack of involvement of the state on behalf of the elite, thus allowing peasants and independent producers fight it out and avoid succumbing to the protection or subjugation of a landholding elite.[27]
In discussion of the second problem on the relation between wealth and violence, Unger shows that the European innovation on traditional solutions to securing wealth against violence and using wealth to obtain violence was a combination of public financing and military entrepreneurship, which allowed states to mobilize wealth and manpower to secure borders and project economic imperatives. However, to achieve this states had to be strong and elites fragmented. Even then still not necessary that have such an outcome, as was the case of the seventeenth-century Dutch state, which was quite wealthy but did not invest in military development and subsequently was overcome by Britain.[28]
Empowered democracy 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.[29]
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.[30]
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.[31]
- 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.[32] 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.[33] 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).[33] 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.[31]
- 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.[34]
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.[35]
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." [35] 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."[35] 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."[35]
[edit] Law in Modern Society: Towards a Criticism of Social Theory
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 Studies 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.
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.[36]
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.[37]
Key in Unger's thinking is the need to re-imagine social institutions before attempting to revise them. This calls for a program, or 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 ‘feudalism’ or ‘capitalism’. 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.[38]
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.[39] 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."[39]
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 globalization, 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.[40]
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.[41] In his two books The Left Alternative and The Future of American Progressivism, Unger lays out a 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.[41] 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."[41]
Unger has laid out concrete policy proposals in areas of economic development, education, civil society, and political democracy.[42]
- 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 not 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 through 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.
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 that we exist within social contexts but 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."[43][44] For Unger, there is no natural state of the individual and his social being. Rather, we are infinite in spirit and unbound in what we can become. 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.[43][45][46]
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 real 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."[45][47][48]
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 means that 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 we must be able to recreate our context, which can only be done in a singular world within which time is real.[49]
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 and Kant has leveled against it."[50] 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.
Unger has written and spoken extensively on religion and the human condition.[22][23][43][49] 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 grasp 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.[14][43] The future of religion lies in embracing our mortality and our groundlessness.[49]
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.[43][51]
There are three major responses in the history of human thought to these flaws: escape, humanization, and confrontation.[43][52]
- 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 Buddhism and philosophical thought of Plato 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. Confucianism 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 Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the profane voice of the secular projects of liberation.
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."[43]
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." [49]
Unger's philosophy of space and time argues for the singularity of the world and the reality of time. His arguments are grounded in the tradition of natural philosophy. He takes on the Newtonian idea of the independent observer standing outside of time and space, addresses the skepticism of David Hume, rejects the position of Kant, and attacks speculations about parallel universes of contemporary cosmology.[47][48][53] 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."[47]
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.[47][53][54]
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.[47][53][55]
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.[56]
One consequence of these positions that Unger points to is the revision of the concept and function of 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.[47][57]
Unger has a long history of political activity in Brazil. He worked in early opposition parties in the 1970s and 80s against the Brazilian military dictatorship, and drafted the founding manifesto for the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) in 1980.[15] He served as an intimate adviser to two presidential candidates, and launched an aggressive exploratory campaign himself in 2000. He was the Secretary for Strategic Affairs in the Lula administration from 2007–2009, and is currently working on a number of social and developmental projects in the state of Rondônia.[58]
Driving Unger's political engagement is the idea that society can be made and remade. Unlike Mill or Marx who posited a particular class as the agent of history, Unger does not see a single vehicle for transformative politics. He advocates world-wide revolution, but does not see this happening as a single cataclysmic event or undertaken by a class agent, like the Communist movement. Rather, Unger sees the possibility of piecemeal change, where institutions can be replaced on at a time, and permanent placticity can be built into the institutional infrastructure.[59]
This position has made Unger's engagements episodic. He has engaged at the national level in Brazil by supporting candidates who promised change, and more recently directly himself by serving in the central government and partaking in political and social projects around the country.
Unger's engagement in Brazilian politics began in the late 1970s as Brazil started to democratize. In 1979, he presented himself to the main opposition party, the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), and was appointed chief of staff by party leader Ulysses Guimaraes. His inial work was to develop the positions of the party and draft policy proposals for their party's congressional representatives.[17] When the military regime dissolved the two-party system and established a multi-party system later that year, Unger worked to unite progressive liberals and the independent, non-communist left into the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB). As a co-founder of the party, he authored its first manifesto.[1] Unger left the party after the rise of a conservative faction, which was a part of the MDB but had been excluded from the initial formation of the PMDB.[60]
After departing the PMDB in the early 1980s, Unger began looking for political agents who would serve as vehicles for his national alternative. In 1981, he jointed the Democratic Labour Party of Brazil (PDT) led by Leonel Brizola, a former governor of Rio de Janeiro and a figure of the left prior to the dictatorship. Brizola had founded the PDT and Unger saw it as the authentic opposition to the military regime. Throughout the 1980s he worked with Brizola to travel the country recruiting members, and developing policy positions and a political language.[61]
In 1983, Brizola, then serving his second of three terms as governor of Rio de Janeiro, appointed Unger to head the State Foundation for the Education of Minors (FEEM), a state-run foundation for homeless children. During his year long tenure, he began a process of radical reforms of the institutions, such as opening the door to international adoption and reintegrating children with their families. He also set up community organizations in the slums to help support families in order to prevent the abandonment of children.[62]
In 1990, Unger ran a symbolic campaign for a seat in the national chamber of deputies. He had no money, no structure, and only campaigned for eight weeks. He ran on a platform of reforming the slums, and went around the slum neighborhoods giving lectures. He received 9,000 votes, just 1,000 votes short of winning the seat. None of the votes came from the slums, however. All his votes had come from the middle class, even though he had never campaigned in those neighborhoods or to that constituency.
Recalling the experience, Unger says "it was kind of absurd... I had no money, no staff, and I would go into these slums, alone, to hand out pamphlets, often to the local drug pushers."[1] It is an experience that Unger cites as leading to his belief that the system and possibilities were much more open than he had previously imagined.[63]
Unger served as Brizola's campaign organizer and primary political advisor in his bids for the Brazilian Presidency in 1989 and 1994. In 1989, Brizola finished in third place, losing the second position, which would have qualified him for a runoff against Fernando Collor de Mello, by a very narrow margin to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Brizola and Unger both supported Lula in the second round of the election, but Collor would go on to beat Lula and win the Presidency.
Unger also supported the presidential bids of former finance minister and governor of Ceará, Ciro Gomes, in 1998 and 2002. In 1998, Gomes came in third place with 11% of the vote, and in 2002 he came in fourth place with 12% of the vote. Unger had written The Next Step: An Alternative to Neoliberalism with Gomes in 1996. Again, in the second round of the election, Unger supported Lula, who would defeat José Serra to win the Presidency.[64]
With the experience of supporting others who imploded politically, Unger discovered that, as he put it, he was committing "the classic mistake of the philosophers in politics, which is to try to find someone else to to do the work."[65] In 2000, he began a campaign for the mayor of Sao Paulo on the PMDB ticket, but the party leader suspended the convention when it became clear that Unger would win the nomination and challenge party control.[citation needed] He also launched an exploratory presidential bid in 2005, but the PMDB decided not to put forth its own candidate for the presidency, but to support Lula of the PT.[citation needed]
Unger found President Lula's first term to be conservative and riddled with scandal. He wrote articles calling Lula's administration "the most corrupt of Brazil's history" and called for his impeachment.[66] Despite the criticism, many advisors to Lula insisted that he should invite Unger to join his administration. In June 2007, after winning his second term, Lula appointed Unger as head of the newly established Long-term Planning Secretariat (a post which would eventually be called The Minister of Strategic Affairs).[67]
Unger's work in office was an attempt to enact his program. Seeing the future in small enterprises and advocating 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.[68] He further 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.[69] Unger's specific projects while in office were focused on giving "ordinary men and women the instruments with which to render this vitality fertile and productive." He aimed to use state powers and resources to allow the majority of poor workers to "follow the path of the emergent vanguard."[70] He developed a series of sectoral and regional initiatives that would prefigure the model of development based on the broadening of economic and educational opportunity by democratizing the market economy and restructuring civil society.
Sectorally, Unger revamped the educational structure and rewrote labor laws. In eduction, he implemented a model of secondary education, where analytical problem-solving education was paired with technical education that focused on conceptual capabilities rather than job-specific skills. There are several hundred of these institutions today.[citation needed] He further drafted legislation to associate national, state and local jurisdictions into common bodies that could intervene when a local school system fell below the minimum acceptable threshold of quality and "fix it the way an independent administrator would fix a failing business under Chapter 11 bankruptcy."[71] In labor, Unger worked with unions to write new labor laws designed to protect and organize temporary workers, subcontractors, and those working in the informal economy.[citation needed]
Regionally, some of Unger's most influential work was the implementation of a developmental strategy for the Amazon. He drafted and passed legislation to regularize small-scale squatters on untitled land by giving them clear legal titles. Included in this law were protections against large scale land grabbers. Such legislation aimed to empower locals living on Amazonian land by giving them ownership rights and linking their interest in preserving it, rather than pillaging it as quickly as possible in the face of ambiguous ownership rights. Although this legislation passed and was put into law, the lack of an implementation structure has kept reform from taking hold.[citation needed]
Unger's term was not without controversy. His nomination to the Institute of Applied Economic Research, or IPEA, a government think tank previously attached to the Planning Ministry, caused fear that he would politicize the institution, which had traditionally been seen as apolitical and independent,[72][73][74][75] and it was even reported that he would disband a long-standing IPEA workgroup that had existed for thirty years.[76] Furthermore, when Lula designated Unger as chief minister to coordinate the future of Amazon policy in May 2008, the minister of environment resigned in protest.[17]
Unger served in the administration for two years. 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.[citation needed] Unger later explained his decision to resign as one arising out of a situation of political deadlock. In the run up to the 2010 presidential elections, legislation could not be pushed through, and he faced increasing opposition for his policy initiatives from Lula's PT party. "If I remained in office, my hands would have been tied and I would have been a hostage to the system," he said.[citation needed]
In the late 1990s, Unger and Mexican politician and political scientist Jorge Castañeda Gutman assembled an informal network of politicians and business leaders dedicated to redrawing the political map. Dubbed the "Latin American Alternative" the aim of the group was to provide a critique of neoliberalism coupled with a way forward in a distinct strategy and institutional model of development. They floated proposals such as guaranteeing every citizen "social rights" (e.g. education and a job), breaking up media oligopolies, and holding town meetings to help citizens supervise municipal spending. The group held a number of meetings over the years, and included Brazilian finance minister Ciro Gomes, Chilean senator Carlos Ominami, Argentinian politicians Dante Caputo and Rodolfo Terragno, and Mexican politician and future president Vicente Fox.[77] The meetings resulted in a document entitled the "Buenos Aires Consensus" in 1997, which Castaneda called "the end of neoliberalism; of the Washington Consensus."[78][79] This consensus was formally signed in 2003 by Argentinian President Néstor Kirchner and Brazilian President Lula da Silva.[80] Other Latin American leaders who signed it included Fox, future president of Chile Ricardo Lagos, Mexican politician Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, former vice president of Nicaragua Sergio Ramirez, future president of Argentina Fernando de la Rua, and former Brazilian president Itamar Franco.[81]
Unger has also advised and discussed his ideas with numerous Latin American politicians and political candidates, including Mexican politician Vicente Fox, first as governor of Guanajuato and then as president.[1] In a long letter to President Fox in July 2001, Unger laid out an economic program for Mexico and urged Fox to become a Roosevelt and not a Hoover.[82]
During the 2008 US presidential campaign, Unger was in frequent contact with candidate Barack Obama via email and Blackberry.[83] He has since become critical of the Obama administration, and has called for the defeat of Obama in the 2012 election as a first step to remaking the Democratic party.[84]
Unger's recent political work has focused on the north-western Brazilian state of Rondônia. He sees the human and natural resources of the state meeting all the conditions to serve as the vanguard of a new model of development for Brazil. Speaking to News Rondônia he said, "Rondônia is a state formed by a multitude of small and medium entrepreneurs together with the Brazilian government, and that is something truly unique in our country."[85]
He has been traveling the state giving public lectures and encouraging political discourse and engagement in localities.[85] Working with governor João Aparecido Cahulla on development projects,[58] Unger has outlined a series of important areas of focus. The first is to change the agricultural model from one of intensive farming to an industrialization of produces through the recuperation of degraded pastures, supply fertilizers and lime, and diversifying crops and livestock farming. The second key project is transforming education from rote learning to creative thinking and engagement. He helped open the School Teixeira in Porto Velho.[85] Another ongoing projects is the construction of a new prison in accordance with his theory of prison reform, where inmates would be reintegrated into society and the labor force.[86]
Unger's philosophical work has been critically hailed as successfully grappling with some of the most fundamental and enduring problems of human existence.[2] It has been put into direct dialogue with Kant's moral law,[3] and said to have provided one answer to Hume's Guillotine.[4] Unger's analysis of liberalism and the philosophical program he builds around rethinking the individual has also inspired new thinking and approaches to psychiatry.[87]
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.[1]
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,[88] and another asked, "in what context Unger himself is situated and why that context itself is not offered up to the sledgehammer."[89][90] Such criticism has largely been answered by Unger with his enumeration of the revolutionary orthodoxy and his outline of world history.[91]
Critics also balked at the lack of example or concrete vision of his social and political proposals.[92] 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."[93] Others have pointed out that the lack of imagination of such readers is precisely what is at stake,[94] while Unger has since answered such criticism with works on social, political, and economic alternatives.[95][96][97][98]
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."[99]
Reviewers of Unger's books have found his writing style philosophically dense and explanations voluminous.[100][101] One reviewer termed his political thought "a staged exercise in political mystique."[102] However, Richard Rorty and others lavished praise for such poetics, comparing Unger to Walt Whitman,[103] and Unger's most recent book, The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound, provides more accessible and condensed access to his thought.[91]
- Knowledge and Politics, Free Press, 1975.
- Law in Modern Society, Free Press, 1976.
- Passion: An Essay on Personality, 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 Zhiyuan.
- Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative, Verso, 1998.
- The Future of American Progressivism: An Initiative for Political and Economic Reform, Beacon, 1998 - with Cornel West
- 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.).
- ^ a b c d e f Press, Eyal (March 1999). "The Passion of Roberto Unger". Lingua Franca. http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9903/unger.html. Retrieved 4 July 2011.
- ^ a b "Review". Michigan Law Review 83 (4): 768–771. February 1985.
- ^ a b Weirib, Ernest J. (June 1985). "Enduring Passion". Yale Law Journal 94 (7): 1825–1841.
- ^ a b Boyle, James (March 1985). "Modernist Social Theory: Roberto Unger's "Passion"". Harvard Law Review 98 (5): 1066-`083.
- ^ Rorty, Richard. “Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future.” Northwestern University Law Review 82 (1988 1987)
- ^ Waldron, Jeremy. “Review: Dirty Little Secret.” Columbia Law Review 98, no. 2 (March 1, 1998): 510–530
- ^ Turley, Jonathan. “Hitchhiker’s Guide to CLS, Unger, and Deep Thought.” Northwestern University Law Review 81 (1987 1986): see esp p. 597, 614-619
- ^ Hutchinson, Allan C, and Patrick J Monahan. “The Rights Stuff: Roberto Unger and Beyond.” Texas Law Review 62 (1984):1477-1539
- ^ S. Fish, “Unger and Milton”, in Doing What Comes Naturally (1989)
- ^ "Latin America optimistic about Obama". TVNZ. November 6, 2008. http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/1318241/2262319.
- ^ Remnick, David (2010). The Bridge. Picador. pp. 184–187.
- ^ "Lectures and Courses". The Work of Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Harvard Law School. http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/unger/video.php#1. Retrieved 28 April 2012.
- ^ a b c Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1987). Social Theory: Its situation and its task. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 1.
- ^ a b Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. "Nihilism, part 1". http://www.youtube.com/user/UngerRoberto#g/c/A1297B2BB4640522. Retrieved 29 November 2011.
- ^ a b Simon, William H. “Social Theory and Political Practice: Unger’s Brazilian Journalism.” Northwestern University Law Review 81 (1987 1986): 312.
- ^ "Biography of Octavio Mangabeira". Brazilian Academy of Letters. http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=pt&tl=en&twu=1&u=http://www.academia.org.br/abl/cgi/cgilua.exe/sys/start.htm%3Finfoid%3D343%26sid%3D243&usg=ALkJrhjx0OP3AoQJXNm_3PqTMhHxqzJJYg. Retrieved 29 March 2012.
- ^ a b c d e f Romano, Carlin (June 6 2008). "Harvard Law's Roberto Unger takes on the future of Brazil". Chronicle of Higher Education 54 (39): B6.
- ^ "Guggenheim Gives Fellowships for '76 Unger Gets Tenure, Too". The Harvard Crimson. April 5, 1976. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1976/4/5/guggenheim-gives-fellowships-for-76-pa/. Retrieved 31 August 2011.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1975). Knowledge and Politics. New York: Free Press.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1976). Law in modern society: toward a criticism of social theory. New York: Free Press.
- ^ Collins, Hugh (1987). "Roberto Unger and the Critical Legal Studies Movement". Journal of Law and Society 14: 388.
- ^ a b Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (2007). The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- ^ a b Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. "Nihilism". http://www.youtube.com/user/UngerRoberto#g/c/A1297B2BB4640522. Retrieved 29 November 2011.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1987). Social Theory: Its situation and its task. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 2, 87–96, 130–133.
- ^ Unger, Roberto (2004). False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, Revised Edition. London: Verso. pp. 35–36, 164, 169, 278–80, 299–301. ISBN 978-1-85984-331-4.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1987). Plasticity into power: comparative-historical studies of the institutional conditions of economic and military success. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1987). Plasticity into power: comparative-historical studies of the institutional conditions of economic and military success. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. chapter 1.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1987). Plasticity into power: comparative-historical studies of the institutional conditions of economic and military success. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. chapter 2.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1987). False Necessity: Anti-necessitarian social theory in the service of radical democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. see esp. ch. 5.
- ^ This summary is drawn from Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1987). Plasticity into Power: Comparative-historical studies on the institutional conditions of economic and military success. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 87–88.
- ^ a b Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (2006). The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. pp. 112–114. ISBN 978-0-674-02354-3.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (2006). The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. pp. 118. ISBN 978-0-674-02354-3.
- ^ a b Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (2006). The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. pp. 119. ISBN 978-0-674-02354-3.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (2006). The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. pp. 123–124. ISBN 978-0-674-02354-3.
- ^ a b c d Unger, Roberto. "Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task". http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/unger/english/pdfs/social_theory3.pdf. Retrieved 15 May 2011.
- ^ For a good discussion of Unger's early work on law see Collins, Hugh (1987). "Roberto Unger and the Critical Legal Studies Movement". Journal of Law and Society 14.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1976). Law in modern society: toward a criticism of social theory. New York: Free Press. See also, Collins, Hugh (1987). "Roberto Unger and the Critical Legal Studies Movement". Journal of Law and Society 14.
- ^ Unger, Roberto (2005). The Left Alternative. Verso. pp. xi.
- ^ a b Unger, Roberto (2005). The Left Alternative. Verso. pp. xxi. ISBN 978-1-84467-370-4.
- ^ Unger, Roberto (2005). The Left Alternative. Verso. pp. vii. ISBN 978-1-84467-370-4.
- ^ a b c Unger, Roberto (2005). The Left Alternative. Verso. pp. ix. ISBN 978-1-84467-370-4.
- ^ These policy points are taken from Unger, Roberto Mangabeira, The self awakened: pragmatism unbound (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007), and Unger, Roberto Mangabeira, "What Progressives Should Propose", (September 2011)
- ^ a b c d e f g Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (2009). "The future of religion". Tanner Lectures. http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/unger/philosophy.php#7.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (2007). The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. pp. 40, ch. 4.
- ^ a b Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (2007). The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. pp. ch. 4, appendix 1.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1986). Passion: An Essay on Personality. New York: Free Press.
- ^ a b c d e f Unger, Roberto Mangbareira (2009). "Laws and Time in Cosmology". Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/unger/video.php#3. Retrieved 30 November 2011.
- ^ a b Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (2012). The singularity of the world and the reality of time: an essay in natural philosophy.
- ^ a b c d Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (2009). "The religion of the future". Tanner Lectures. http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/unger/philosophy.php#7.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1986). Passion: An Essay on Personality. New York: Free Press. pp. vii. ISBN 0-02-933180-3.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. "Nihilism, part 2". http://www.youtube.com/user/UngerRoberto#g/c/A1297B2BB4640522. Retrieved 29 November 2011.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. "Nihilism parts 3-6". http://www.youtube.com/user/UngerRoberto#g/c/A1297B2BB4640522. Retrieved 29 November 2011.
- ^ a b c Frank, Adam (April 2012). "Is the search for immutable laws of nature a wild-goose chase?". Discover Magazine. http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/10-is-search-for-immutable-laws-of-nature-wild-goose-chase/article_view?b_start:int=2&-C=.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (2012). The singularity of the world and the reality of time: an essay in natural philosophy. pp. ch.1, 2.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (2012). The singularity of the world and the reality of time: an essay in natural philosophy. pp. ch.1, 3.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (2012). The singularity of the world and the reality of time: an essay in natural philosophy. pp. ch. 3.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (2012). The singularity of the world and the reality of time: an essay in natural philosophy. pp. ch. 4.
- ^ a b "Mangabeira Unger lança Rondônia como modelo de desenvolvimento". Rondonia Agora. June 14, 2011. http://www.rondoniagora.com/noticias/mangabeira-unger-lanca-rondonia-como-modelo-de-desenvolvimento-2011-06-14.htm. Retrieved 27 April 2012.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. "Introduction," in A Alternativa Transformadora: Como Democratizar o Brasil ed. Guanabara Koogan. (São Paulo, 2009).
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1990). A Alternativa Transformadora – Como Democratizar o Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Guanabara. pp. 65–67.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1990). A Alternativa Transformadora – Como Democratizar o Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Guanabara.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1990). A Alternativa Transformadora – Como Democratizar o Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Guanabara. pp. 68–69.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1990). A Alternativa Transformadora – Como Democratizar o Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Guanabara. pp. 67–71.
- ^ Carta Capital, pg. 26-33. August 14, 2002.
- ^ Revista Playboy. 6/2008.
- ^ Marra, Ana Paula. Mangabeira Unger assume secretaria e diz que Lula foi magnânimo ao convidá-lo para o cargo. Agência Brasil. June 19, 2007. Retrieved on September 8, 2007.(Portuguese)
- ^ Romana, Carlin (June 6, 2008). "Boss Nova". Chronicle of High Education: Chronicle Review. http://chronicle.com/article/Boss-Nova/13595.
- ^ Barrionuevo, Alexei (February 2, 2008). "‘Minister of Ideas’ Tries to Put Brazil's Future in Focus". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/02/world/americas/02unger.html?_r=2&ref=world&oref=slogin&oref=slogin.
- ^ Szabla, Chris (October 4, 2009). "After rocky but influential tenure, Brazil's "Minister of Ideas" returns to HLS". Harvard Law Record. http://www.hlrecord.org/news/after-rocky-but-influential-tenure-brazil-s-minister-of-ideas-returns-to-hls-1.626458.
- ^ Souza, Jesse (2010). Os Batalhadores Brasileiros. Belo Horizonte: Editora da UFMG. pp. Preface.
- ^ Camarena, Rodrigo. "The Rousseff Presidency and Beyond: Interview with Roberto Mangabeira Unger". Foreign Policy Association. http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2011/01/18/the-rousseff-presidency-and-brazil%E2%80%99s-future-interview-with-roberto-mangabeira-unger/. Retrieved 31 March 2012.
- ^ Marra, Ana Paula. Decreto transfere Ipea para Secretaria de Planejamento de Longo Prazo. Agência Brasil. June 19, 2007. Retrieved on September 8, 2007.
- ^ Franco, Ilimar. Temor ronda o Ipea após indicação de Mangabeira. O Globo. April 28, 2007. Retrieved September 8, 2007.(Portuguese)
- ^ Guerreiro, Gabriela.Líderes do PRB minimizam críticas de Mangabeira Unger a Lula. Folha de S. Paulo. April 24, 2007. Retrieved on September 8, 2007
- ^ A ameaça ao Ipea. O Estado de São Paulo. May 4, 2007. Retrieved September 8, 2007.
- ^ de Souza, Josias. Mangabeira Unger faz ‘operação limpeza’ no Ipea. Folha de S. Paulo. September 7, 2007. Retrieved September 8, 2007.
- ^ Castaneda, Jorge. “Mexico: Permuting Power.” New Left Review 7 (January–February 2001)
- ^ Herrera, Ernesto (fevrier 1998). [Alternatives au néolibéralisme ou simple toilettage ? "Consensus de Buenos Aires: Alternatives au néolibéralisme ou simple toilettage?"]. La gauche. Alternatives au néolibéralisme ou simple toilettage ?. Retrieved 22 May 2012.
- ^ Valente, Marcela (December 2, 1997). "Centre-Left Seals Buenos Aires Consensus". Inter Press Service. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=66789. Retrieved 22 May 2012.
- ^ Massaldi, Julian, "Buenos Aires Consensus: Lula and Kirchner's agreement 'Against Neoliberalism'", Znet, November 20, 2003
- ^ Sader, Emir (February 2003). "Latin America: critical year for the left". Le Monde diplomatique. http://mondediplo.com/2003/02/12latinleft. Retrieved 22 May 2012.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. "The Progressive Alternative in a Mexican Context". http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/unger/progressive.php#4.1. Retrieved 22 May 2012.
- ^ Remnick, David (2010). The Bridge. Picador. pp. 185.
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. "Beyond Obama". Beyond Series. Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gnf4k8EaL7M&feature=share. Retrieved 1 June 2012.
- ^ a b c "DESENVOLVIMENTO: GOVERNO OUVE PROPOSTAS DO SETOR PRODUTIVO". News Rondonia. March 15, 2012. http://newsrondonia.com/lerNoticias.php?news=15132. Retrieved 27 April 2012.
- ^ "Mangabeira Unger visita complexo prisional de Porto Velho". Olho Vivo Rondonia. September 14, 2011. http://www.olhovivorondonia.com.br/noticias.php?news=19776. Retrieved 27 April 2012.
- ^ Hobson, J. Allan (1987). "Psychiatry As Scientific Humanism: A Program Inspired by Roberto Unger's Passion". Northwestern University Law Review 81 (4): 791–816.
- ^ Hutchinson, Allan C. "Review: A Poetic Champion Composes: Unger (Not) on Ecology and Women." The University of Toronto Law Journal 40, no. 2 (April 1, 1990): 279.
- ^ Wilder, Joseph C. "Review." The American Political Science Review 83, no. 2 (June 1, 1989): 623.
- ^ See also Yack, Bernard. "Review: Toward a Free Marketplace of Social Institutions: Roberto Unger's ‘Super-Liberal’ Theory of Emancipation." Harvard Law Review 101, no. 8 (June 1, 1988): 1970.
- ^ a b Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. The self awakened: pragmatism unbound. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007.
- ^ Yack, Bernard. "Review: Toward a Free Marketplace of Social Institutions: Roberto Unger's ‘Super-Liberal’ Theory of Emancipation." Harvard Law Review 101, no. 8 (June 1, 1988): 1969.
- ^ Shapiro, Ian. "Review: Constructing Politics." Political Theory 17, no. 3 (1989): 481, 482.
- ^ Rorty, Richard. "Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future." Northwestern University Law Review 82 (1988 1987).
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. Democracy realized: the progressive alternative. London: Verso, 1998
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. Free trade reimagined: the world division of labor and the method of economics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. The future of American progressivism: an initiative for political and economic reform. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998
- ^ Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. The left alternative. London: Verso, 2009.
- ^ Crabtree, James. "The Future of the left: James Carbtree interview Roberto Unger." Renewal 13, no. 2/3 (2005), 173.
- ^ See Yack, Bernard. "Review: Toward a Free Marketplace of Social Institutions: Roberto Unger's ‘Super-Liberal’ Theory of Emancipation." Harvard Law Review 101, no. 8 (June 1, 1988): 1964.
- ^ Ali, Shahrar (July 27, 2004). "Review". The Political Quarterly. http://www.politicalreviewnet.com/polrev/reviews/POQU/R_0032_3179_134_1004348.asp. Retrieved 11 July 2011.
- ^ Fleischmann, Steven. "Review: The Plastic Politics of Abstraction." Contemporary Sociology 17, no. 4 (July 1, 1988): 448.
- ^ Rorty, Richard. "Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future." Northwestern University Law Review 82 (1988 1987). See also Allan C. Hutchinson, "Review: A Poetic Champion Composes: Unger (Not) on Ecology and Women," The University of Toronto Law Journal 40, no. 2 (April 1, 1990): 271-295.
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)
| Persondata |
| Name |
Unger, Roberto Mangabeira |
| Alternative names |
|
| Short description |
|
| Date of birth |
March 24, 1947 |
| Place of birth |
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil |
| Date of death |
|
| Place of death |
|
