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Duke Law Journal, November 1988, 1988 Duke
L. J. 975
Unger and Milton
By Stanley Fish
I
propose to take Roberto Unger as seriously as he takes the questions he raises.
One mark of his seriousness is his insistence on beginning at the beginning,
asking each question as if it had never been asked before. As he puts it, with
the combination of modesty and ambition that makes his voice so distinctive,
"[M]y purpose will be to think as simply as I can about the problems I
discuss. In our age, philosophy has won some triumphs because a few men have
managed to think with unusual simplicity."
Thinking simply about Unger, or trying to, means going back to his early work in
an effort to understand more fully those later writings that have recently
brought him public attention. I shall begin with Knowledge and Politics,
with a view toward identifying a structure of concerns that continues to
underlie his more recent publications. For a while I shall try, quite
uncritically, to lay out "as simply as I can" the very complex
argument of a difficult book. It is only when I turn to The Critical
Legal Studies Movement (and I shall make no attempt to characterize that
movement, an effort that now constitutes a genre of its own) that I shall
introduce my reservations and criticisms.
My use of Milton is at once illustrative and polemical. In general the legal
academy, even that part of it that admires Unger, has been puzzled and
discomforted by him. This discomfort reflects, I think, the uncongeniality of
theological discourse to the legal mind, and in linking Unger's thought to
Milton's (with no suggestion of influence, although influence is by no
means impossible) I hope to provide a context in which the nature and direction
of his project becomes clear. At the same time I am preparing the way for my
most general conclusion about Unger, which is that insofar as he is a religious
thinker, concerned always to inform the particular moments of everyday life with
the imperatives of a universal and Godly vision, he will never be able to
fashion the politics for which so many of his readers wait. (Speak, Unger.)
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