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Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a philosopher and politician. His writings offer a comprehensive view of our humanity, and together with his politics present a path by which humankind and each individual can hope to rise to a greater life, He has developed his views and positions across many fields including social, political, legal, and economic theory in an effort to realize the modernist project of the world made and imagined. His theories of false necessity and empowered democracy offer an alternative to neo-liberalism. He has further offered a radicalized revision of pragmatism, and his work in legal theory helped form the Critical Legal Studies movement and to disrupt the methodological consensus in law schools. His political activity helped bring about democracy in Brazil, and culminated with his appointment as the Brazilian Minister of Strategic Affairs.
Unger studied law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and was awarded a research doctorate by Harvard after he had already been teaching there for several years.
At the root of Unger’s thought is the conviction that the world is made and imagined. His work begins from the premise that no natural social, political, or economic arrangements underlie individual or social behavior. Property rights, liberal democracy, wage labor—for Unger, these are all historical artifacts that have no necessary relation to the goals of free and prosperous human activity. His books have sought to explicate the ideals of human social, political, and economic activity, and to free them from their institutional chains. Doing so, he holds, will enable the realization of the full extent of human potential and, as he puts it, “make us more god-like.†For Unger, the market, the state, and human social organization should not be set in predetermined institutional arrangements, but need to be left open to experimentation and revision according to what works for the project of the empowerment of humanity.
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