Roberto Mangabeira Unger Quotes on Politics
Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a Brazilian philosopher and the Roy L. This page collects quotes attributed to Roberto Mangabeira Unger on the topic of politics, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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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.”
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“[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 -
“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 -
“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