What Should the Left Propose?

by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

What Should the Left Propose? is a manifesto that engages a vital issue of our the program for which Leftists should stand, now that the ideological proposals of the past two hundred years are exhausted.

Confronting the major debates in the world today — about national alternatives and alternative globalizations — Unger shows that there is a set of national and global alternatives that we can begin to develop with the materials at opportunities available to us only if we learn to recognize them. These alternatives would, over time, vastly enhance our practical capabilities. They would also give greater reality to the central teaching of faith in the constructive genius of ordinary men and women.

For Unger, a programmatic argument is not a blueprint; it marks a direction and explores next steps. He explores the form this direction could take in the European social democracies, in the United States, in the developing countries, and in the contest over the reform of globalization. He shows how the Left in power can do more than use compensatory redistribution to sugarcoat economic inequality, and how it can make good on its ideals without reaffirming a discredited commitment to governmental control of the economy.

179 pages, Hardcover

First published January 5, 2006

About the author

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (born 24 March 1947) is a philosopher and politician. He has written notable works including Politics: A Work In Constructive Social Theory and The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. He has developed his views and positions across many fields, including social, and political, and economic theory. In legal theory, he is best known for his work in the 1970s-1990s 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 and which led to the writing of What Should Legal Analysis Become? 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 late work in economics culminates in his characterization and program toward The Knowledge Economy. 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 with the capability to rise to a greater life. At the root of his social thought is the conviction that the social world is made and imagined. His work begins from the premise that no natural or necessary 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.

Reviews

[Mz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Όπως και άλλα κείμενα που έχουν γραφτεί από εν ενεργεία πολιτικούς, έτσι και αυτό, είναι γεμάτο ασάφειες, κοινοτοπίες και κουραστικές επαναλήψεις. Από μένα είναι όχι.

[Nonpanglossian]

DNF @ 59%. I get that this is theory, so maybe it's absurd to say it was "too abstract" but that is how it felt. The writing was rife with repetitive phrases that gradually began to feel like bludgeons and on seemingly the thousandth mention of "retrospective tax-and-transfer", I just had to give up.

[Owlseyes]