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Northwestern University Law Review,
Summer 1987,
81 Nw. U.L. Rev. 693
Beyond Tragedy and Complacency
By Drucilla Cornell
I. INTRODUCTION
In a time when cynicism about politics is popular wisdom, and proclamations
about the inevitability of further bureaucratization and rationalization in a
modern society are held to be common sense, Roberto Unger's Politics is
a powerful, passionate reminder that if we are locked in an iron cage, it is at
least in part a cage of our making. Indeed, Unger would not accept my mild
caveat, for his is a stronger thesis. If we have imprisoned ourselves in a
particular form of social organization, says Unger, it must be of our own
making, because social forms are our artifacts. Our social world is
made, not given.
One of the central tasks of Politics is to hammer home the full
significance of that insight to us moderns or postmoderns who have succumbed to
the illusion of false necessity, and who by so doing have dulled our own
awareness of revolutionary possibility. Unger, of course, is addressing both
American academics and the activists in Brazil who, in the wake of a recent
resurgence of democracy, are vigorously debating competing visions of social
life and the contours of political theory. Unger does not speak from the
sidelines of the political struggle in Brazil; he is an active participant in
it. Programs which seem hopelessly utopian to the world-weary cynics of the
advanced Western democracies take on a very different meaning in a society in
which the very idea of democracy has only recently become more than an
aspiration, and in which the basic structures of government have yet to be
settled. One can only marvel at the comprehensiveness of Unger's Politics.
He gives us political and economic programs reaching into all levels of social
life.
Unger's basic lesson is that what has been made can be radically remade. To
argue otherwise, he suggests, is to rest on philosophical conceptions of a
natural order of society or on an evolutionary theory of social types defined by
an appeal to deep structure, whether it be the Marxist motor of capitalism or
the Weberian complexity of modernity. Of course, Unger does not believe
that each one of us is free to remake society in his or her image. Unger
understands and indeed emphasizes that the remaking of society is a collective
project; otherwise, individual aspirations are too easily turned against the
individual's own vision in the very attempt to realize that vision in a
restructured social order. Unger recognizes that when our dreams of a different
social order are brought to earth in the unsettling process of actual politics,
they turn into something very different from what we originally dreamed. For
Unger, the pathos of the imperfect intelligibility of society and collective
action is eloquently expressed by William Morris:
Men fight and lose the
battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and
when it comes turns out to be not what they wanted, and other men must fight for
what they wanted under another name.
Unger believes the very reality of other selves makes complete pliability a
useless aspiration. Yet, in spite of this insight into imperfectibility and the
inevitable incompleteness of individual effort, Unger's view of the self
emphasizes the will and the needless restlessness of a self that "is the
infinite caught within the finite." The reconstructive democracy Unger
advocates reflects his vision of this self. Rather than overcome the
conditionality of our finite condition, we recognize it with a vengeance, never
pretending that the latest social order is the fully realized Kingdom of God.
The romantic longing to find a home in the world is countered by the romantic
vision's other side: No world is or can be home for the infinite striving self.
The plasticity of all social institutions is the "good" left to us once we have
recognized that society is truly our artifact. And why is plasticity a "good"
for Unger? Because for him, the only social and political order that can be
"true" to the context-transcending or negative capacity of the self is one which
fully incorporates the insight that society is our artifact, and which therefore
continually opens itself to challenge and to revision.
By "negative capacity" Unger means to indicate our capacity to "negate," and by
so doing to "rise above" the contexts in which we are immersed. Nor is negative
capacity a privilege of the few. As modern subjects, Unger sees us all
as characterized by this capacity, no matter how much its actual exercise may be
in abeyance. Unger translates the Sartrean view of the self as a transcendence
into a categorical imperative. The "good" society must respect the negative
capacity in each of us. Only this move to universalize respect for this capacity
-- a move that Unger does not explicitly make, but which I would argue is
implicit in his political program -- prevents Unger's vision from degenerating
into a view of the subject as the will to power; a view not easily rendered
consistent with the aspiration to radical democracy. To say that social life is
all politics is only to reaffirm our power to transcend the contexts which shape
our lives, and to break through the reified patterns of living which have frozen
into a "second nature." The good society -- Unger's own radical democracy -- is
true to the insight into conditionality insofar as it incorporates the occasions
and instruments of its own revision. By so doing, it respects each one of us as
a will which can potentially challenge the social structures of our present
world.
Unger, however, offers us more than mere optimism of the will; he seeks to
salvage social theory. He does so by emphasizing the role of imagination in
generalization and explanation. Unger holds that we only understand what is by
imagining it transformed. Unger's understanding of the role of transformative
ideals in social theory leads him to deny that one can retrospectively give a
coherent and rational narration of the meaning of a given body of law. Actual
legal decisions are the muddled outcome of the clash of subjective wills. Those
who argue that one can find in any body of law or in the very idea of
constitutional government, a rational set of immanent principles or ideals --
even when they forthrightly recognize that these ideals have been imperfectly
realized -- confuse their own imagination with actual events in the past. For
example, Unger would deny that the "new" civic republicans are really
interpreting the Constitution or reconstructing the intent of the Founding
Fathers. Instead, they are unconsciously, or indeed consciously, imposing their
own vision on the past.
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