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Northwestern University Law Review,
Summer 1987,
81 Nw. U.L. Rev. 732
Unger's Politics and the Appraisal
of Political Possibility
By John Dunn
What really is politically
possible? How different, over any given period of time, could our collective
social and political life be caused to become? Just how is it epistemically
appropriate and humanly decent to conceive political possibility?
Few, if any, questions about the meaning of human existence so directly and
intimately link personal temperament and cognitive style as the question of what
really is politically and socially possible. To equate our more edifying desires
with the possible consequences of our political actions is merely an agreeable
exercise in self-deception. On the other hand, to identify the contours of our
existing social arrangements as the current embodiments of "the ancient laws of
society" or as structural preconditions for social and political existence here
and now is the most ignominious superstition. But the happy Aristotelian mean
between these two types of cognitive indignity is as hard to characterize as it
is to locate.
The most striking feature of Roberto Unger's new trilogy is the confidence with
which it presses an answer to all of these questions. The answer is arrestingly
novel in many respects, though it draws with great cunning and analytical energy
upon many strands of modern thinking and historical scholarship. The core of
Unger's answer is impressively integral and unmistakably l'homme meme
-- a direct expression of Unger's highly idiosyncratic fusion of individual
disposition and cognitive style. The answer rests on a taut but oddly stable
balance between an intense scepticism and an at least equally intense faith. The
scepticism dictates the judgment that we can never under any circumstances know
what is politically possible or how different our collective social and
political life could be caused to become. But the faith -- what Unger calls "the
radical project" -- insists that this limit on our cognitive powers is an
occasion for exultation rather than a ground for mourning and never, under any
conceivable conditions, an excuse for lassitude, torpor, or resignation. For
Unger, the message of modern world history is that we should revel in the
indeterminacy of the future. Despite all of its horrors, modern history is a
story of human empowerment, invention, and self-recreation, both individual and
collective, a history of what Unger calls "negative capability."
Taken on its own, the natural impetus of either element in this combination is
deeply distasteful to Unger. At the level of practical reason, the sophisticated
scepticism of modern understandings of the character and development of human
cognition yields a nasty choice. The choice is between a radical
depoliticization of the imagination and a sinister obsession with the
manipulative opportunities potentially afforded by fusing esoteric knowledge
with condensed social and political power. This second option leaves the task of
emancipation of men and women to the social and political cognoscenti.
They, in consequence, find themselves claiming a kind of social knowledge which
is necessarily unavailable. And along with this, and presumptively licensed by
it, they also claim a degree of manipulative control that sets fierce and
degrading limits on the freedom of action of their fellow human beings. A wide
variety of modern thinkers have explored these dangers, and Unger does not make
any especially decisive suggestions on how they can be avoided.
What Unger does offer, however, is a compelling picture of the impossibility,
short of thermonuclear war, of sundering the potential for drastic social and
political reconstruction from the exercise of modern state power. This theory is
of great importance and interest because it conflicts so sharply with the
educated political sensibility in most contemporary states -- as much in the
Russia of Mr. Gorbachev, the India of Mr. Gandhi, and the Japan of Mr. Takeshita,
as in the United States of Mr. Regan or the Italy of Mr. Goria. Unger does not
deny the massively routine character of most modern politics. But unlike the
effectively habituated observers of modern politics -- journalists, politicians,
economists, political scientists, and citizens -- the strategy of understanding
which he deploys resists with the greatest obduracy any equation of
intelligibility with fatality.
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