Roberto Mangabeira Unger Quotes
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. The quotes below are attributed to Roberto Mangabeira Unger, organized by topic.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger on Freedom
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“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.”
p. 295 -
“In a free society, the individual has the educational equipment, as well as the economic and political occasion, to cross the frontier between the activities that take the framework for granted and those that bring it into question. He has been educated in a way that enables the mind as imagination to become ascendant over the mind as machine. He has learned to philosophize by acting, in the sense that he recognizes in every project the seed of some great or small reformation.”
p. 295 -
“The reader should understand that this book forms a small part of a larger intellectual program: a struggle against fate through thought, an effort to give new meaning and new life to projects of individual and social liberation that for the last two hundred years have shaken and aroused the whole world, a fight to imagine the forms that those projects can and should take if they are to have a future.”
p. 187
Roberto Mangabeira Unger on God
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“[T]here is a path of ascent, requiring and enabling us to undergo a transformation of both society and the self, and rewarding us with an incomparable good. The incomparable good is a greater share of the attributes of the divine, or eternal life, or a greater life, with higher powers, making us more godlike.”
p. 121 (explaining the religious tradition Unger calls "struggling with the world")
Roberto Mangabeira Unger on Justice
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“One of the greatest merits of the critical legal studies movement was to have created an intellectual space in which law and legal thought could be better used to resist the dictatorship of no alternatives. Its limited but important contribution to such resistance was the development of ideas about alternatives, made from the contradictions and variations in established law. The greatest failure of the movement was not to have embraced and executed this task more fully.”
p. 15 -
“[T]he quest for a social world that can better do justice to a being whose most remarkable quality is precisely the power to overcome and revise, with time, every social or mental structure in which he moves.”
p. 105
Roberto Mangabeira Unger on Knowledge
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“I belong to the generation of 1968, which, throughout the world, hoped to recast society on the model of the imagination. I have tried to learn from disappointment and defeat, but I have not despaired. "If the fool would persist in his folly," wrote William Blake, "he would become wise.”
p. 188
Roberto Mangabeira Unger on Mind
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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.”
p. 187-8
Roberto Mangabeira Unger on Nature
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“p. 121 (explaining the religious tradition Unger calls "struggling with the world")”
[T]here is a path of ascent, requiring and enabling us to undergo a transformation of both society and the self, and rewarding us with an incomparable good. The incomparable good is a greater share of the attributes of the divine, or eternal life, or a greater life, with higher powers, making us more godlike.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger on Politics
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Attributed to Roberto Mangabeira Unger:
“We are bigger than the structures we build and inhabit; politics begins when we remember this.”
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Attributed to Roberto Mangabeira Unger:
“Institutions are made by us, even when they seem most inevitable.”
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Attributed to Roberto Mangabeira Unger:
“False necessity is the philosophical name of the worship of what merely happens to exist.”
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Attributed to Roberto Mangabeira Unger:
“A society is hospitable to greatness when it makes itself easy to remake.”
Roberto Mangabeira Unger on Time
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Attributed to Roberto Mangabeira Unger:
“The future is not something to be predicted; it is something to be invented.”
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“In history obedience rarely pays; what pays is defiance.”
p. 8