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Northwestern University Law Review,
Summer 1987,
81 Nw. U.L. Rev. 625
The City of Unger
By Milner S. Ball
My generation is tempted to
think that the irony of innocence savaged and destroyed is a description of
necessary reality. We grew to middle age through the assassinations of John
Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the war in Vietnam, and the depressing
acceptance of a political and religious fundamentalism that has installed
William Rehnquist as Chief Justice of the United States and rendered Pat
Robertson a candidate for the Presidency. We have found Marxism overtaken by
necrosis and Western culture captured by self-absorption.
We are lured by the belief that serious commitment to a just world means that
sooner or later our hearts will be broken. This is the temptation of a modest,
modern version of the sense of impotence that Herodotus attributed to a Persian:
That which is destined to come to pass as a consequence of divine activity, it
is impossible for man to avert. Many of us are aware of this truth, yet we
follow because we cannot do otherwise. Of all the sorrows which afflict mankind,
the bitterest is this, that one should have consciousness of much, but control
over nothing.
Other less classic temptations exist. One is the upbeat mythology of T. Boone
Pickens, Lee Iacocca, the Hunt brothers, and J. R. Ewing: do deals and abandon
the realities of mass suffering for bold, unapologetic acquisitiveness. Another
temptation is to give up and do nothing. Another is to attempt everything and
become locked into frenetic, universal opposition.
If we refuse these temptations, it is because we catch glimpses of another, more
authentic possibility. The facts yield no ground for optimism, and yet we snatch
from them intimations of more and better. We are led to suspect the penultimacy
of current events and to anticipate the ultimate. Our suspicions draw
nourishment from several sources, including surprises, exceptions, and
experiments that spring up, against the odds, in the United States, in Europe,
and -- promisingly -- in the Third World.
I was provoked to think about these things in trying to understand Roberto
Unger's three-volume Politics, which is for him a labor of aspiration
and responsibility. To those impressed by the pervasive hopelessness that
innocence will always be savaged and destroyed, he addresses an explanatory
theory and a program for translating theory into action. He would give us hope.
I read Politics as what Unger says it is, the writing of a person
engaged in a particular way in Brazilian politics. His engagement has
singular characteristics: its partly Christian impulse, its critical relation to
Marxism as well as to North Atlantic culture, and, above all, its ambition and
the immediate form which that ambition takes.
Unger is bent upon increasing the power and wealth of the people of Brazil and,
at the same time, producing a governmental and economic example to inspire all
mankind. If this is a type of grand ambition common to all politicians of
conscience, not until now has it assumed the Ungerian form. Who else would have
embarked upon the Brazilian enterprise accompanied by three heavy volumes of
theory from Cambridge?
Before undertaking this mission, Unger scoured the existing universe of
available literature in search of guidance. Disappointed by what he found, he
determined to rethink and recast the whole for himself. The result is to
politics what string theory is to physics: a Theory of Everything. There is
sweep and brilliance to Politics. It is illuminating as well as
affecting. It has inspired revisions in my own thinking and has led me to
undertake new, small-scale political responsibilities in my own modest
circumstances.
Imagine, then, the reluctance with which I confess to a fundamental reservation
about Unger's books: Politics undercuts the very response it seeks to
elicit. These three volumes compose a long, demanding achievement. The
difficulty for the sympathetic reader, however, is not one of quantity or
complexity but of quality and voice.
The writing grows remote and abstract, with everything done by the author in
cold terms. Nothing is left for the reader but to observe and try to take it in.
The substance Politics offers is milk and honey processed into an
unpalatable powder, freeze-dried by a powerful intellect intent upon the
humorless demands of space travel. Unger recruits us for a grand journey of the
mind into hope and action, but as the theory lifts and spirals toward heaven, we
are left behind to marvel and applaud at a distance, for this can only be a solo
voyage. Wayne Booth made the admonitory observation that "even the most
unconscious and Dionysian of writers succeeds only if he makes us join in the
dance." Politics does not succeed in this sense, and could not,
given the fundamental choice which Unger makes and which finally accounts for my
misgivings.
Unger chooses theory and writes in obedience to theory. Imaginative and bold as
its theoretical projections are, however, Politics does not persuade me
that loosening the mind from the poetic equivalent of the force of gravity, as
Unger would do, will equip it to overcome injustice, loneliness, and
belittlement in the world. Politics is a remarkable achievement. It
warrants study, attention, and celebration. It contributes aid to the rescue of
humanism from the failures of liberal democracy, Marxism, modernism, and
Christendom. But neither Politics nor theory nor the human intellect
can work the redemption of humanity. The destruction of innocence is not the
last word. Neither is Politics.
Unger does place before us with fresh urgency the need to reckon with the
possibilities and limits of active human responsibility. If our last, best hope
does not lie in "the greatness of the human heart" (Unger's term), then where?
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