Roberto Mangabeira Unger - Institutional Quotes

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I have pursued this intellectual program by building a radical alternative in social theory to Marxism, by recasting legal thought as an instrument of the institutional imagination, by proposing particular institutional alternatives for the organization of the economy and the state, and by developing a philosophical conception of nature and mankind within which history is open, novelty is possible, and the divinization of humanity counts for more than the humanization of society.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger
This enlarged view of the radical cause... allows us to connect leftism and modernism, the radical politics of institutional reform and the radical politics of personal relations, a political vision obsessed with issues of dependence and domination and a moral vision concerned with the inability of the individual to gain practical, emotional, or even cognitive access to other people without forfeiting his independence.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Futurity should cease to be a predicament and should become a program: we should radicalize it to empower ourselves. That is the reason to take an interest in ways of organizing thought and society in ways that diminish the influence of what happened before on what can happen next. Such intellectual and institutional innovations make change in thought less dependent on the pressure of unmastered anomalies and change in society less dependent on the blows of unexpected trauma.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger
By the structure of society, I mean the institutional and ideological presuppositions that shape the routine practices, conflicts, and transactions in that society, and that are largely taken for granted, even to the point of being invisible, as if they were part of the nature of things. In a free society, this institutional and ideological framework does not present itself as an alien fate beyond the reach of the transformative will and imagination.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger