Roberto Mangabeira Unger Quotes on Time
Roberto Mangabeira Unger's philosophy is built around the conviction that the future is open and makeable, and the quotes gathered here express that view of time. Social structures, for Unger, are not part of the nature of things but the mutable products of history, which means they can be remade by human will and imagination. He reads history as rewarding initiative over passivity, for in history obedience rarely pays and what pays is defiance, and he rejects waiting to be crowned by history, insisting instead that we crown ourselves. His program of democratic experimentalism refuses to defer action until a complete theory is agreed. Unger sums up his orientation in a sequence of preferences that ends time over eternity, life over everything, a philosophy that sides with the unfinished and the possible.
Quotes
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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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“[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") -
“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 history obedience rarely pays; what pays is defiance.”
p. 8 -
“A democratic experimentalist will not stand waiting for the next magical moment. Rather than have us be crowned by history, he will insist that we crown ourselves.”
What Should Legal Analysis Become?(1996) | p. 20 -
“There is no permanent canon of forms of normative argument. Our ways of arguing about ideals are, like our other practices, the mutable products of a specific history and the expressions of our ideas about society and thought.”
False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy(1987) | p. 361 -
“The radicals want something of the quality of the hot moments of social life—the periods of accelerated collective mobilization—to pass into the cold moments—the ordinary experience of institutionalized social existence.”
False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy(1987) | p. 433 -
“We cannot wait until we agree upon the truths of a new social theory to think and act as democratic experimentalists. We must find the ideas our efforts and commitments require, and try to make no assumptions that the facts of social reality and historical experience invalidate.”
Democracy Realizedː The Progressive Alternative(1998) | p. 15 -
“Imagination over dogma, vulnerability over serenity, aspiration over obligation, comedy over tragedy, hope over experience, prophecy over memory, surprise over repetition, the personal over the impersonal, time over eternity, life over everything.”
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound(2007) | p. 237