Roberto Mangabeira Unger b. 1947

Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a Brazilian philosopher and the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard, whose work has spanned legal theory, political philosophy, and Brazilian public life, where he has twice served in cabinet. Knowledge and Politics and Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory mounted a critique of contemporary social theory and offered a programme of plasticity-friendly institutions designed to expand the powers of ordinary people to remake the conditions of their lives. The Self Awakened, The Singular Universe, and The Religion of the Future have extended his project into philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and the philosophy of religion.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger was born at Rio de Janeiro in March 1947 into a family with a long political tradition; his maternal grandfather Otávio Mangabeira was a Brazilian foreign minister. He took his law degree at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and his master's and doctoral degrees in law at Harvard, where he was appointed to the faculty in 1970 and tenured in 1976 as one of the youngest professors in the school's history. He has twice served as Brazilian Minister of Strategic Affairs, under Lula in 2007–2009 and under Dilma Rousseff in 2015.

His books include Knowledge and Politics (1975), Law in Modern Society (1976), Passion: An Essay on Personality (1984), the three-volume Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory (False Necessity, Plasticity into Power, Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task, 1987), What Should Legal Analysis Become? (1996), The Self Awakened (2007), The Religion of the Future (2014), The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time (2014, with Lee Smolin), and The Knowledge Economy (2019). He was a co-founder of the Critical Legal Studies movement.

Unger has long argued against the 'false necessity' of existing institutions: the social, legal, and economic arrangements that present themselves as natural are in fact contingent and reformable, and the human task is to remake them in the direction of greater agency, experimentation, and self-revision. His mature work extends the same anti-necessitarian programme into religion, education, the structure of the firm, and the philosophy of cosmology.