Roberto Mangabeira Unger Quotes on Freedom
Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s three-volume Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory (1987) and the more recent The Self Awakened (2007) develop one of the most ambitious contemporary statements of philosophical liberalism beyond the standard Rawlsian and libertarian frameworks. The principal claim is that genuine human freedom is not the freedom of choice within an institutional framework taken as given — the institutional structures themselves are revisable through the imaginative and political work of ordinary human agents, and the proper philosophical and political vocation is the deepening of democracy into a permanent capacity for institutional self-renewal. The framework, integrating Brazilian constitutional practice, Critical Legal Studies, and a metaphysics of the self that draws on the German idealist and pragmatist traditions, grounds Unger’s parallel work in legal theory, political economy, and the philosophy of religion.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Roberto Mangabeira Unger:
“We are bigger than the structures we build and inhabit; politics begins when we remember this.”
-
Attributed to Roberto Mangabeira Unger:
“Institutions are made by us, even when they seem most inevitable.”
-
Attributed to Roberto Mangabeira Unger:
“The future is not something to be predicted; it is something to be invented.”
-
“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