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The Future of American Progressivism: An Initiative for Political and Economic Reform
Unless Americans prove themselves willing to be as open-minded about the institutional arrangements of the country as they have been about almost everything else, they will continue to find their hopes frustrated. It is not enough to rebel against the lack of justice unless we also rebel against the lack of imagination.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornel West argue that the path to progressive reform goes through reorganization of our economic and political instutitions; tax and spending are not enough. Breaking with the conventional ideas of American progressive politics, they show how we can stimulate economic growth and guarantee a minimum of resources for all citizens.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornel West argue that the path to progressive reform goes through reorganization of our economic and political instutitions; tax and spending are not enough. Breaking with the conventional ideas of American progressive politics, they show how we can stimulate economic growth and guarantee a minimum of resources for all citizens.
104 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
3 people are currently reading
188 people want to read
About the author
Cornel West
147 books1,219 followersCornel Ronald West is an American scholar and public intellectual. Formerly at Harvard University, West is currently a professor of Religion at Princeton. West says his intellectual contributions draw from such diverse traditions as the African American Baptist Church, Marxism, pragmatism, transcendentalism, and Anton Chekhov.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 15, 2014
tl;dr - this is not the Roberto Unger you are looking for.
Heard Roberto Unger on the Economist and was pretty intrigued - the call for radical transformation of public institutions via experimentation/innovation was in my wheelhouse.
The most charitable reading would be:
...intellectually, there's a lot to like here - and maybe that's enough? But, ugh, that reading would be so charitable that it would ignore the haphazardly argued, loopy book that actually got written. There are some nice turns of phrase, but as a collection of words that either calls you to action or coherently explains the argument sketched above, Future of American Progressivism is pretty disappointing.
Here, as briefly as possible, are some of those problems:
1) Vague, to the point where it's not clear what's being argued. As in, if this was a term paper, it would be fair to return it with a note at the top that said "You only need to write one introductory paragraph for your argument, not 6." You simply can't sustain the amount of throat-clearing that happens here while finding time to lay out an argument this big in 93 short pages.
2) What shoulders do they stand on? or not stand on? At some points, I found myself writing 'is this Hayek?' in the marginalia. Walt Whitman and John Stuart Mill make a fleeting appearance, and there are some head nods to the Jeffersonian democratic thinking v. 0.1, but that's about it. This is especially weird considering that Cornel West is involved, and that guy is the most erudite speaker I've ever heard.
3) It's totally unclear what kind of innovation they want - and in fact, the political program laid out probably doesn't get anywhere close to the grand 'new method of politics' pronouncements in pt. 1. Concrete things that get said: privatize social security, replace income tax with consumption tax, try more public contracting or privatization of utilities, job training, and state-owned venture capital funds. The last one (public venture capital) is interesting, but like 2/3 of the other stuff got proposed by Bush 43, which I can't imagine was Cornel West's point.
Heard Roberto Unger on the Economist and was pretty intrigued - the call for radical transformation of public institutions via experimentation/innovation was in my wheelhouse.
The most charitable reading would be:
Unger and West were pretty forward thinking (this is published in the late 90s, after all), for anticipating the growing challenge of inequality to the country (they call this the economic vanguard vs the rearguard) and for laying out a program of labor reskilling/continuous learning, health care/education, and innovative vehicles for capital investment via quasi-public institutions.
Here's their argument in a nutshell:
1) As a country we are characterized by a "belief that Americans can make themselves and remake their society, that they can make everything new" (4)
2) ...through the "faith in the genius of ordinary men and women" (11)
3) ...confronting problems 'through human effort and ingenuity. Americans resist seeing particular problems as the manifestation of hidden, hard constraints. They believe that the terrors of vast problems yield to the effects of many small solutions."
Progressives, though, have abandoned innovation and experimentation; the left has lost imagination and mostly worries about the rollback of older transfer programs or treating the symptoms of inequality. We need a new spirit of collective action, one that is local and bottom up, that uses market institutions and is open-minded and innovative about new institutional arrangements that will reduce inequality.
...intellectually, there's a lot to like here - and maybe that's enough? But, ugh, that reading would be so charitable that it would ignore the haphazardly argued, loopy book that actually got written. There are some nice turns of phrase, but as a collection of words that either calls you to action or coherently explains the argument sketched above, Future of American Progressivism is pretty disappointing.
Here, as briefly as possible, are some of those problems:
1) Vague, to the point where it's not clear what's being argued. As in, if this was a term paper, it would be fair to return it with a note at the top that said "You only need to write one introductory paragraph for your argument, not 6." You simply can't sustain the amount of throat-clearing that happens here while finding time to lay out an argument this big in 93 short pages.
2) What shoulders do they stand on? or not stand on? At some points, I found myself writing 'is this Hayek?' in the marginalia. Walt Whitman and John Stuart Mill make a fleeting appearance, and there are some head nods to the Jeffersonian democratic thinking v. 0.1, but that's about it. This is especially weird considering that Cornel West is involved, and that guy is the most erudite speaker I've ever heard.
3) It's totally unclear what kind of innovation they want - and in fact, the political program laid out probably doesn't get anywhere close to the grand 'new method of politics' pronouncements in pt. 1. Concrete things that get said: privatize social security, replace income tax with consumption tax, try more public contracting or privatization of utilities, job training, and state-owned venture capital funds. The last one (public venture capital) is interesting, but like 2/3 of the other stuff got proposed by Bush 43, which I can't imagine was Cornel West's point.
July 10, 2023
“If we propose a reform that seems distant from present realities and debates, people may say: interesting but utopian. If we propose a reform close to the established situation, people may respond: feasible but trivial. Thus, all proposals may seem either trivial or utopian. Why bother? It is a false dilemma arising from a mistake about the nature of programmatic ideas.
A program such as ours is not a blueprint; it begins to map out a path. The steps along the way can and should be described both at points close to present circumstances and at points further away. The direction-and its effect upon people's understanding of their interests and identities as well as upon their practical problems is what matters.“
“It is easy to be a realist when you accept everything. It is easy to be a visionary when you confront nothing. To accept little and confront much, and to do so on the basis of an informed vision of piecemeal but cumulative change, is the way and the solution.”
“The extension of vanguardist practices beyond the favored sectors of society where they now flourish and the consequent lifting of the backward sectors require help, including help from the government. The rearguard will not be able to lift itself by its bootstraps. The task is to give this help in a way respecting the economic discipline and the decentralized insight of a market rather than imposing a bureaucratic scheme of favors and privileges.
In at least one area of the American economy, in historical perspective, this goal was carried out to tremendous effect. American agriculture, from the nine-teenth-century Homestead Acts up to the New Deal-era agricultural extension services and credit unions, was organized as a partnership between the federal government and the family farmer. The Homestead Act of 1862 promised 160 acres of relatively free land to citizens who intended to make it productive.
…If now much of the traditional apparatus of this partnership seems archaic, restrictive, and ridden with unjustifiable concessions to powerful interests, we must not forget that it worked for much of the history of the country. It laid the basis for an agriculture combining remarkable efficiency with widespread decentralization of economic power and initiative. The domination of big business over industry found a partial counterweight in an economy of family farms and small towns. What the American progressives never discovered was an effective counterpart to this agrarian alliance between the little guy and the government that could work beyond agriculture, for the rest of the economy. Nor did they envisage the political reforms that would sustain and organize the high-energy popular politics needed to support such a project over time.”
“They lacked both the wit and the power to challenge any of the economic and educational arrangements that imposed deep divisions between advanced and backward sectors of the economy and between the life paths that led to each. With middle-class entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare so cleanly separated, by the accident of their historical evolution and legislative design, from poverty assistance programs, and with a country in which the federal government seemed increasingly powerless to relieve the problems of ordinary working families, many lost patience with policies that at best alleviated some consequences of poverty rather than addressing its causes. They believed those schemes to be funded at the expense of the working majority”
"race is typically just one element, although often a major one, of the social disablement we seek to repair.
The law should develop standards to give a special push in schooling and employment and therefore also in admissions and hirings-to those who suffer from an accumulation of forms of disadvantage from which they cannot be expected to escape on their own. Prominent among these sources of subjugation are class, race, gen-der, and handicap. We know for a fact that it is the convergence of some of these factors in the life situation of an individual that may prevent him or her from seizing upon the opportunities of American society. Placed in this context, the offer of preferment loses its invidious, narrowly racial character. We can defend it, as a matter of the law and the Constitution (although it would surely require a change of present constitutional under-standings), because it helps make feasible the demand for individual self-reliance. It helps keep the promise of equal opportunity for all.
Such an effort is useful and even necessary. It is, however, no substitute for the broader attempt to democratize the market economy in America, narrowing the gap."
"Labor laws need to be strengthened, not to deepen divisions between a minority of relatively privileged workers in traditional industry and everyone else, but to facilitate unionization everywhere. As temporary work increases in many sectors of the economy, we need to reform the labor laws to encourage the unionization of temporary workers and to ensure the blend of legal regulation of the employment relation and collective bargaining with the employer that is appropriate to their circumstances. More generally, we have to create a structure in which union representation of workers and collaborative profit sharing with workers come to be seen as complementary rather than incompatible approaches.
Otherwise, we shall have allowed a contest between cooperation at work and association among workers to develop at the heart of industry, threatening the project of greater economic democracy in America.
An emphasis on early and continuing education and reskilling rather than on job tenure, the development of varied forms of worker protection suited to the circumstances of a segmented labor force, and a commitment to generalize the principle of worker participation in company profits can combine to reverse one of the most antidemocratic trends in recent American life: the decrease of the wage take from national income."
A program such as ours is not a blueprint; it begins to map out a path. The steps along the way can and should be described both at points close to present circumstances and at points further away. The direction-and its effect upon people's understanding of their interests and identities as well as upon their practical problems is what matters.“
“It is easy to be a realist when you accept everything. It is easy to be a visionary when you confront nothing. To accept little and confront much, and to do so on the basis of an informed vision of piecemeal but cumulative change, is the way and the solution.”
“The extension of vanguardist practices beyond the favored sectors of society where they now flourish and the consequent lifting of the backward sectors require help, including help from the government. The rearguard will not be able to lift itself by its bootstraps. The task is to give this help in a way respecting the economic discipline and the decentralized insight of a market rather than imposing a bureaucratic scheme of favors and privileges.
In at least one area of the American economy, in historical perspective, this goal was carried out to tremendous effect. American agriculture, from the nine-teenth-century Homestead Acts up to the New Deal-era agricultural extension services and credit unions, was organized as a partnership between the federal government and the family farmer. The Homestead Act of 1862 promised 160 acres of relatively free land to citizens who intended to make it productive.
…If now much of the traditional apparatus of this partnership seems archaic, restrictive, and ridden with unjustifiable concessions to powerful interests, we must not forget that it worked for much of the history of the country. It laid the basis for an agriculture combining remarkable efficiency with widespread decentralization of economic power and initiative. The domination of big business over industry found a partial counterweight in an economy of family farms and small towns. What the American progressives never discovered was an effective counterpart to this agrarian alliance between the little guy and the government that could work beyond agriculture, for the rest of the economy. Nor did they envisage the political reforms that would sustain and organize the high-energy popular politics needed to support such a project over time.”
“They lacked both the wit and the power to challenge any of the economic and educational arrangements that imposed deep divisions between advanced and backward sectors of the economy and between the life paths that led to each. With middle-class entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare so cleanly separated, by the accident of their historical evolution and legislative design, from poverty assistance programs, and with a country in which the federal government seemed increasingly powerless to relieve the problems of ordinary working families, many lost patience with policies that at best alleviated some consequences of poverty rather than addressing its causes. They believed those schemes to be funded at the expense of the working majority”
"race is typically just one element, although often a major one, of the social disablement we seek to repair.
The law should develop standards to give a special push in schooling and employment and therefore also in admissions and hirings-to those who suffer from an accumulation of forms of disadvantage from which they cannot be expected to escape on their own. Prominent among these sources of subjugation are class, race, gen-der, and handicap. We know for a fact that it is the convergence of some of these factors in the life situation of an individual that may prevent him or her from seizing upon the opportunities of American society. Placed in this context, the offer of preferment loses its invidious, narrowly racial character. We can defend it, as a matter of the law and the Constitution (although it would surely require a change of present constitutional under-standings), because it helps make feasible the demand for individual self-reliance. It helps keep the promise of equal opportunity for all.
Such an effort is useful and even necessary. It is, however, no substitute for the broader attempt to democratize the market economy in America, narrowing the gap."
"Labor laws need to be strengthened, not to deepen divisions between a minority of relatively privileged workers in traditional industry and everyone else, but to facilitate unionization everywhere. As temporary work increases in many sectors of the economy, we need to reform the labor laws to encourage the unionization of temporary workers and to ensure the blend of legal regulation of the employment relation and collective bargaining with the employer that is appropriate to their circumstances. More generally, we have to create a structure in which union representation of workers and collaborative profit sharing with workers come to be seen as complementary rather than incompatible approaches.
Otherwise, we shall have allowed a contest between cooperation at work and association among workers to develop at the heart of industry, threatening the project of greater economic democracy in America.
An emphasis on early and continuing education and reskilling rather than on job tenure, the development of varied forms of worker protection suited to the circumstances of a segmented labor force, and a commitment to generalize the principle of worker participation in company profits can combine to reverse one of the most antidemocratic trends in recent American life: the decrease of the wage take from national income."
November 7, 2024
SOME PROPOSALS TO MAKE AMERICA A MORE EQUITABLE COUNTRY
Professors Roberto Unger and Cornel West wrote in the first chapter of this 1998 book, “The oldest and most American element of American life is the religion of individual and collective responsibility: the belief that Americans can make themselves and remake their society, that they can make everything new. The American dream includes a middle-class standard of living for anyone… as well as opportunities for people’s children to achieve what their parents failed to accomplish or obtain… Today, however, at the apogee of its world power and in the midst of an economy thriving as rarely before, most working Americans feel more squeezed than ever, and convinced that life will be harder for them than it was for their parents… The practical consequence … is that Americans despair of collective solutions to their collective problems… In this American circumstance the triumphalism of the doctrine of the one true way rings hollow. National triumph goes hand in hand with individual impotence.” (Pg. 3-5)
They observe, “A large part of the population remains below the economic and educational threshold it must pass to profit from merit-based selection procedures. It is a benefit to Americans that … they deny legitimacy to class… [However] they have usually been unwilling or unable to recognize its force in their national life. The basic design of the class system has remained as stable in American reality as it has been clouded in American consciousness.” (Pg. 16)
They note, “The United States is rich and powerful because it is a country of experimenters. Motivated, sustained, and cumulative tinkering with institutional arrangements is an indispensable tool of democratic experimentalism, of improvisational reform, and jazzlike public action.” (Ph. 20)
They propose, “The essence of the progressive idea today should lie in the conviction that the advance of the economy toward greater flexibility and decentralization can go hand and hand with a strengthening of individual initiatives and capabilities… such a marriage of economic flexibility and individual empowerment can flourish only in the context of a more organized citizenry and a more energized polity than Americans have yet built.” (Pg. 25)
They state, “We reject the choice between a view that would promote popular interests without reimagining and remaking institutional arrangements as pieces of a take-it-or-leave-it system… To understand the truth about political possibility, we need to … combin[e] the idea of step by-step reform with the idea that institutions matter. We have it in our power to reimagine and remake them. The institutions of a society are its fate. Transformative politics is, like art, an anti-fate, restoring to us a freedom we had renounced or forgotten.” (Pg. 30)
They note, “two great advances took place in the generations following the New Deal. The first advance was… a second wave of entitlement programs addressed to the poor…. The second advance was the development … of a far-reaching body of civil rights law, written to stamp out the evils of racial and sexual discrimination and racist segregation. The trouble is, disconnected from any broader effort to promote democratization of the market, curtail corporate power, and energize democratic politics, each of these two advances has proved fragile to the point of being reversible. Each has turned out inadequate to its professed objectives.” (Pg. 51-52)
They explain, “The program we outline opposes dualism, the division of the economy into a rigid contrast of advanced and backward sectors, and proposes a deepening of democracy: strengthening the tools for the collective discussion and solution of collective problems. It is… a productivist program, rooting a bias toward more equality of income and wealth in a set of economic arrangements and a strategy of economic growth, rather than … attempting, thorough retrospective and compensatory tax-and-transfer, to undo part of what the economy has wrought. It resists the simple contract between governmental activism and free enterprise… because it insists on having more of both. To this end, our program offers to renovate the institutional machinery for a decentralized and experimental partnership between government and business.” (Pg. 57)
They propose, “Broad-based taxation of consumption (as through the … flat-rate, value-added tax) can make it possible to increase revenues while easing the burden of taxation upon saving and investment.” (Pg. 61) Later, they add, “A shift to consumption-based taxation may help raise the saving level by exempting savings from taxation…The most important setting in which to introduce such a system is Social Security and private-pension reform.” (Pg. 64)
They suggest, “The school in a democracy should take no part in delivering to the child the ancient message of the family or the local community: Become like me. It has a bigger job: to equip the child with the means to think and to stand on his or her own feet, bringing the ideas and experiences of far away or long ago to bear on the understanding and the criticism of the here and now. The school should examine the possibilities of imagination and of life that the surrounding society is unable or unwilling to countenance. It should be the voice of the future---or alternative futures---within the present, and it should recognize in the child, the future worker and citizen, a little prophet.” (Pg. 70)
They conclude, “To understand your country you must love it. To love it you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as it is, however, is to betray it… you must love it for that in which it shows what it might become. America… needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it.” (Pg. 93)
This book will be of interest to progressives, and similar-minded persons.
Professors Roberto Unger and Cornel West wrote in the first chapter of this 1998 book, “The oldest and most American element of American life is the religion of individual and collective responsibility: the belief that Americans can make themselves and remake their society, that they can make everything new. The American dream includes a middle-class standard of living for anyone… as well as opportunities for people’s children to achieve what their parents failed to accomplish or obtain… Today, however, at the apogee of its world power and in the midst of an economy thriving as rarely before, most working Americans feel more squeezed than ever, and convinced that life will be harder for them than it was for their parents… The practical consequence … is that Americans despair of collective solutions to their collective problems… In this American circumstance the triumphalism of the doctrine of the one true way rings hollow. National triumph goes hand in hand with individual impotence.” (Pg. 3-5)
They observe, “A large part of the population remains below the economic and educational threshold it must pass to profit from merit-based selection procedures. It is a benefit to Americans that … they deny legitimacy to class… [However] they have usually been unwilling or unable to recognize its force in their national life. The basic design of the class system has remained as stable in American reality as it has been clouded in American consciousness.” (Pg. 16)
They note, “The United States is rich and powerful because it is a country of experimenters. Motivated, sustained, and cumulative tinkering with institutional arrangements is an indispensable tool of democratic experimentalism, of improvisational reform, and jazzlike public action.” (Ph. 20)
They propose, “The essence of the progressive idea today should lie in the conviction that the advance of the economy toward greater flexibility and decentralization can go hand and hand with a strengthening of individual initiatives and capabilities… such a marriage of economic flexibility and individual empowerment can flourish only in the context of a more organized citizenry and a more energized polity than Americans have yet built.” (Pg. 25)
They state, “We reject the choice between a view that would promote popular interests without reimagining and remaking institutional arrangements as pieces of a take-it-or-leave-it system… To understand the truth about political possibility, we need to … combin[e] the idea of step by-step reform with the idea that institutions matter. We have it in our power to reimagine and remake them. The institutions of a society are its fate. Transformative politics is, like art, an anti-fate, restoring to us a freedom we had renounced or forgotten.” (Pg. 30)
They note, “two great advances took place in the generations following the New Deal. The first advance was… a second wave of entitlement programs addressed to the poor…. The second advance was the development … of a far-reaching body of civil rights law, written to stamp out the evils of racial and sexual discrimination and racist segregation. The trouble is, disconnected from any broader effort to promote democratization of the market, curtail corporate power, and energize democratic politics, each of these two advances has proved fragile to the point of being reversible. Each has turned out inadequate to its professed objectives.” (Pg. 51-52)
They explain, “The program we outline opposes dualism, the division of the economy into a rigid contrast of advanced and backward sectors, and proposes a deepening of democracy: strengthening the tools for the collective discussion and solution of collective problems. It is… a productivist program, rooting a bias toward more equality of income and wealth in a set of economic arrangements and a strategy of economic growth, rather than … attempting, thorough retrospective and compensatory tax-and-transfer, to undo part of what the economy has wrought. It resists the simple contract between governmental activism and free enterprise… because it insists on having more of both. To this end, our program offers to renovate the institutional machinery for a decentralized and experimental partnership between government and business.” (Pg. 57)
They propose, “Broad-based taxation of consumption (as through the … flat-rate, value-added tax) can make it possible to increase revenues while easing the burden of taxation upon saving and investment.” (Pg. 61) Later, they add, “A shift to consumption-based taxation may help raise the saving level by exempting savings from taxation…The most important setting in which to introduce such a system is Social Security and private-pension reform.” (Pg. 64)
They suggest, “The school in a democracy should take no part in delivering to the child the ancient message of the family or the local community: Become like me. It has a bigger job: to equip the child with the means to think and to stand on his or her own feet, bringing the ideas and experiences of far away or long ago to bear on the understanding and the criticism of the here and now. The school should examine the possibilities of imagination and of life that the surrounding society is unable or unwilling to countenance. It should be the voice of the future---or alternative futures---within the present, and it should recognize in the child, the future worker and citizen, a little prophet.” (Pg. 70)
They conclude, “To understand your country you must love it. To love it you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as it is, however, is to betray it… you must love it for that in which it shows what it might become. America… needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it.” (Pg. 93)
This book will be of interest to progressives, and similar-minded persons.
February 3, 2018
Good starting point for progressive thinking but the common thread throughout is this. Are you the progressive thinker or are you spoon fed the progressive viewpoint and then believe it’s yours.
February 5, 2014
Great ideas, but I would recommend The Left Alternative as an intro to Unger's thought.
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