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Frasi di Roberto Mangabeira Unger
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Roberto Mangabeira Unger is philosopher and politician. He has developed his views and positions across many fields, including social, political, and economic theory. In legal theory, he is best known by his work in the 1970s and 80s while at Harvard Law School as part of the Critical Legal Studies movement, which is held to have helped disrupt the methodological consensus in American law schools. His political activity helped the transition to democracy in Brazil in the aftermath of the military regime, and culminated with his appointment as Brazil's Minister of Strategic Affairs in 2007 and again in 2015. His work is seen to offer a vision of humanity and a program to empower individuals and change institutions.

At the core of his philosophy is a view of humanity as greater than the contexts in which it is placed. He sees each individual possessed of the capability to rise to a greater life. At the root of his social 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 activity. 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. 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 individual and collective empowerment. Doing so, he holds, will enable human liberation.

Unger has long been active in Brazilian opposition politics. He was one of the founding members of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party and drafted its manifesto. He directed the presidential campaigns of Leonel Brizola and Ciro Gomes, ran for the Chamber of Deputies, and twice launched exploratory bids for the Brazilian presidency. He served as the Minister of Strategic Affairs in the second Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration and the beginning of the second Dilma administration. Unger is also the subject of the feature documentary Visions for the Future directed by Robert Rippberger chronicling his work in Brazil in the Amazonian state of Rondônia putting theory into practice.

✵ 24. Marzo 1947
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger: 94   frasi 2   Mi piace

Roberto Mangabeira Unger: Frasi in inglese

“I am a leftist, and, by conviction as well as by temperament, a revolutionary …. Any association of mine with Barack Obama in the course of the campaign could do only harm.”

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Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Quoted in David Remnick, The Bridgeː The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010), p. 185 (explaining why he avoided press inquiries during Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, concerning his association with Obama at Harvard Law School)
On Barack Obama

“The radicals want something of the quality of the hot moments of social life—the periods of accelerated collective mobilization—to pass into the cold moments—the ordinary experience of institutionalized social existence.”

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Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Origine: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 433

“The cultural-revolutionary politics of personal relations may be far more firmly established in the domains of domesticity, leisure, and consumption than in the organization of practical life. It may still flourish more strongly among the educated professional classes than among ordinary working people. Its war against the tyranny of roles and hierarchies may be perverted by a lack of institutional imagination. Yet its achievements are real. We cannot understand them merely as a series of episides in the confined life of high culture. We can often trace the ideas of this cultural-revolutionary politics of role-jumbling to the work of small numbers of thinkers, artists, and professional outsiders. But the diffusion of these ideas through the medium of popular culture, and the sympathy with which they have been greeted by ever larger sectors of the population, would have been inconceivable without a prior transformation of social life. As always, people had to see enacted before their eyes a fragmentary example of the connection between the freedom to revise social arrangements and assumptions and freedom from dependence and depersonalization. Only then could they want more of the same and believe more possible.”

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Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Origine: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), pp. 293-294

“The struggle for counterfactual insight—the attempt to see what things might become along a periphery of possible next steps around how things are now—presents us with what at first seems to be a conundrum of the understanding…. If we cannot close the configuration space of the possible states of affairs and bring them all under the regime of a closed and timeless set of laws, we cannot be sure that we shall be able to fight our way back from our flight of causal inquiry to the recovery of the phenomenal world in its visionary immediacy. We shall be unhappy because our consciousness of the world will remain divided between the poetry of experience and the science of nature…. There is an aspect of our mental life in which we enjoy such a reconciliation. However, its presence there instead of reassuring us ought to arouse and disturb us all the more. It should do so both by suggesting what we lack in the remainder of our conscious experience and by implying that the reconciliation is a mirage, never to be grasped. Dreams regularly join two features, the combination of which eludes us in our waking livesː counterfactual insight and visionary immediacy.”

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Roberto Mangabeira Unger libro The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Origine: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 157-8.

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