Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a Harvard law professor considered one of the leading theorists on the subject of politics. His epic three-volume set, Politics, set out an alternative to Marxism and social democracy. Unger's beliefs include rejection of the search for a lawlike society.
In a work that calls for attention and study, the good professor suggests ways to rebuild political, social, and economic systems. Now Verso, the excellent publishing house in London and New York, has published a trade paperback distillation of Unger's magnum opus. Politics: The Central Texts contains nearly 500 pages of Unger's fascinating theories. Zhiyuan Cui, a lecturer in social theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has contributed an introduction in which he labels Unger's work as "breathtaking."
"Unger's social theory can be understood as an effort to carry the idea of 'society as artifact' to the extreme," Cui writes. "He teaches that 'society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact rather than the expression of an underlying natural order.'"
As Unger concludes, "The program of radical democracy has a more troubled relation to the strengthening and cleansing of solidarity. The fulfillment of its proposals does not ensure us of coexisting in peace. It does not take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. But it does enable us to live out more fully the tense, ambiguous, ennobling connection between solidarity and the development of our faculties, between our longing for one another and our efforts to find particular expressions for the impulse within us that rebels against all particularity. What more could we ask of society than a better chance to be both great and sweet?"
Anyone with the patience and willingness to sift through Politics: The Central Texts will come away enlightened and more attuned to the possibilities of Unger's theories, which were described by Geoffrey Hawthorn as "the most powerful social theory of the second half of the twentieth century."
More book reviews
Back to Front Page