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Northwestern
University Law Review, Summer 1987, 81
Nw. U.L. Rev. 766
Practical Reason and Social Democracy:
Reflections on Unger's Passion and Politics
By Geoffrey
Hawthorn
I.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger's project is
breathtaking. It is also paradoxical. He is writing what may be the most
powerful social theory of the second half of the century and yet wants to stop
social theory as it is usually understood. He defends all but the most radical
of modernist tenets and yet proposes the "archaic idea of a universal
language of self-reflection" that has prescriptive force. I want to pursue
this paradox.
I want to suggest that one can come to Unger's project as what he nicely
describes as a "modest eclectic," that is, as one who accepts the
limitations of existing models of social explanation and political possibility
but who suspects "that drastic reconstructive proposals will shatter
against limits more unyielding than a mere accumulation of institutional and
imaginative biases." I want also to suggest that one may remain more truly
skeptical than Unger about other people, and about the possibilities of knowing
other people. I want nevertheless to agree that one may, for these reasons and
for Unger's, resist the more extremely modernist option, what Unger calls
"ultra-theory," because, unlike Unger's own "super-theory,"
"ultra-theory" sits uneasily between accepting what it pretends to
reject and rejecting everything, including the basis for anything it may itself
want to accept. I want in short to suggest that one can in these ways reach
conclusions which -- though perhaps more qualified than Unger's -- are not
opposed to them. The only difference is that one does so more pragmatically.
II.
Insofar as social theory has attempted to connect the concerns of exemplar
history with ethics and the scientific method -- that is, insofar as it has
marshalled examples of how we have lived in order to answer the question how we
should live -- it has failed. It has done so, Unger himself suggests, in
essentially two ways. The first is methodological. Each of the two prevailing
modes of analysis, which Unger calls "deep-structure analysis" and
"positivist social science and naive historiography," has retreated
into spurious naturalism. One has done so by supposing "a closed list of
structures"; the other by eliding the distinction between contingent
"routines," or unreflective practices, and unavoidable constraints.
This arises in part from the fact that European social theorists were
"tempted to misunderstand the triumphant European settlements as the
necessary form of a stage in world history," and from this to derive a
theory of natural and necessary stages.
The second failure is connected to the first. It is a failure of imagination, a
failure to think about human possibility. "Positivist social science"
and "naive historiography" do not directly concern themselves with
possibility. At best, they specify conditions that have been met elsewhere and
suggest that if those conditions are repeated, the previous outcomes may recur.
But these outcomes may not be desirable, and they will not exhaust the
possibilities. "Deep-structure analysis," on the other hand, does
consider possibility -- Marxism is the most conspicuous case -- but both
confines it in "false necessity" and is curiously coy about its
substance and shape. As in romance, the battles are fought with the loved one.
What the love, when lived, looks like remains obscure.
What is possible, Unger suggests, is a question in politics. Indeed, "it's
all politics." Not only is the question of what the human future will be
self-evidently political. It is also that the eighteenth-century thought that a
social world exists that is self-creating and self-governing, to be explained
neither by legislation nor by character but by principles that are distinctively
its own, has been subverted by events. That thought may have made some sense for
those European worlds that in the eighteenth century were already beginning to
disappear. It has subsequently made some sense for those societies that
Europeans and their anthropologists had begun to discover elsewhere. But it has
increasingly been overturned in the ironical outcome, in strong modern states,
of the enthusiasm for popular rule which in part inspired it. As Unger argues,
The triumph of liberal or authoritarian mass politics has weakened the system
of fixed social stations that might enable people to seek their essential safety
in the performance of a precise social role and in the claims upon resources and
support that may accompany these roles. The experience of world history, with
its headlong recombination of institutional practices and ways of life, has
forced whole peoples increasingly to disengage their abstract sense of
collective identity from their faithfulness to particular customs.
To understand that fact and to think constructively about what to do with it one
has now to think of politics and law as something more than the epiphenomenal
expressions of other, as it has often been said in social theory, more
"fundamental," kinds of event.
The rehabilitation of politics, that is, the disinclination to believe that the
answers in theoretical reason are sufficient for questions of practice, is, in
the 1970s and 1980s, an increasingly common theme in discussions both of social
theory and of politics. Many commentators have reacted to the collapse of
practical reasoning in "positivism" or to the theoretically more
deliberate attempt to preempt it in "structures." Rawls and Habermas
are perhaps the most serious. But even they, dissimilar in other respects
though they are, are in important respects, and similarly, insufficient.
Both start with a conception of what people are, and of the most general
circumstances in which they find themselves, and argue to a view of what
societies that included such persons could be. Both assume that people are
committed to live together and to arrive at an agreed form of, or framework for,
collective life through a "reflective equilibrium" (Rawls' phrase) or
through "self-reflection" (Habermas'). Both further assume -- Rawls
more clearly than Habermas -- that having agreed to a form of collective life,
people will agree to explicit principles to maintain it and will decide these
principles in an equally explicit procedure. This can be done, they both
believe, with the greatest practicable degree of social transparency, as Rawls
calls it, with the greatest "publicity." And the society that is to be
thus "public" is a society of the kind that we, as distinct from the
medieval English or the citizens of modern Zaire, do now inhabit. It is a
society in which incomes and wealth are the "all-purpose means," in
which there are further constraints in practical life and "discourse,"
but in which it can make sense to imagine that there exist the will and the
means to arrive at a reflective equilibrium between our intuitions and our
reasons.
But neither Habermas nor Rawls makes clear how a mere understanding of a common
interest -- either in justice or in what Habermas calls Mundigkeit --
might hold such a society together. Nor is it clear in either thinker for whom
such a society is an option. Unlike Habermas, Rawls does see that there are
innumerably many and particular loves and attachments and thick conceptions of
the good. But having consigned them to the private realm, as liberal moral
philosophers tend usually to do, he, like Habermas, leads us out all too easily
to the politically opaque and uninteresting constituency of all the rational
agents there are.
In their original impulse and formulation, each of these theories represents a
retreat from social theory. Each depends to the least possible extent on any
fact about any actual society, and each rests on a conception of persons which
is at once thin and prior to any such society. If the theories differ, it is in
their respective inclinations to teleology and in their attitudes toward the
distinction between the public and the private. Rawls, unlike Habermas, has no
telos; he also, unlike Habermas, distinguishes between the good, a private
matter, and the right, an object of justice that is accordingly public.
But these differences should not obscure the fact that each, as Unger puts it,
is an instance of "the disappointing consequences of the modern
philosophical attempt to dispense" -- Unger should say, as far as one can
-- "with a view of the self or of society as a basis for normative
vision." In reply to false necessity, he complains, they offer only
emptiness; or, if they do secrete a substantive conception, they retreat. Having
lost the older and putatively universal social theories, we are left with a
dilemma: we either have a politics which, as a politics for us, as we are, is
insufficient to motivate us; or we have sociologies which are too
specific.
Unger's escape from this dilemma is dramatic and clear. "The ultimate
stakes in politics," he claims, "are the fine texture of personal
relations." Politics accordingly requires a conception of human
nature that is both fuller and more firm than that which the Kantians and other
liberals provide, but which stops short of the "metaphysical realism"
in alternative theories like those of Aristotle and Marx: a conception which
steers between the thin and arbitrary character of the one and the thick but
unacceptable preemption, what Unger sees as the causal or teleological false
necessity, of the other.
In the first place, the conception must have some initial claim on us as we
think we are. Unger believes that we can profitably start from the
"conceptions and projects supported by the major world religions and the
moral doctrines associated with them." But, he immediately adds, it
does not much matter where we start, since a second and more important condition
is that the conceptions which are worth pursuing are those that are strengthened
by criticism, rather than reduced by it. The third condition is that those
conceptions which survive the criticism also, as a result, converge.
Unger concludes that the two that do survive and converge are the
"Christian-romantic" and the modernist. Each has "two great
themes." In the romantic extension of Christianity, these are
"the primacy of personal encounter and of love as its redemptive moment,
and the commitment to a social iconoclasm expressive of man's ineradicable
homelessness in the world." In modernism, they are the belief that
"our dealings with other individuals have primacy over the search for an
impersonal reality or good," and the belief "that no institutional
order and no imaginative vision of the varieties of possible and desirable human
association can fully exhaust the types of practical or passionate human
connection that we may have good reason to desire and a good chance to
establish." Seen in this light, indeed, modernism is no more than a
"moment" in the transformation of the Christian-romantic view. But
although it corrects the Christian-romantic's tendency to locate the good either
in the transcendental or in a fixed set of rules, glossed with sentiment -- the
nineteenth-century, call it "bourgeois," view of the good, the view to
which the first modernists were reacting -- modernism can too readily tip into a
self-destructive reflex of resentment, and thus, into nihilism or a fatalism
about the possibility of revising the contexts it rejects. In the modernist
view, which has as its principled corollary what Unger calls
"ultra-theory," there can too easily be no constructive politics at
all.
To redress this, Unger argues, the relentlessly particularizing impulse in
modernism must be connected to a "universalizing discourse." Unger
does not "deny that the categories and commitments of a normative tradition
have a historically located origin." Such a tradition "will
probably always bear the marks of its specific historical genesis," and, to
that extent, it is unrealistic to hope that social theory will be truly
"universal." But through the "universalizing
discourse," modernism can give "revised sense . . . to the antique
ambition of universality in prescriptive theories of human nature."
The "universalizing discourse" will "recast our ideas about
sociability by diminishing their dependence upon a historically confined sense
of associative possibility [and permit us to] imagine the ordering of social
life that empowers us more fully by giving freer play to the two great dynamics
of empowerment -- the dynamics of passion and of practical problem-solving, each
of which requires that our relations to one another be kept in a state of
heightened plasticity." Of course, this recasting "implies a
gamble," but the only alternatives, Unger insists, are radical skepticism
or cultural fatalism. The politics that results is accordingly intended to
enhance "our practical capability through the openness of social life to
the recombinatorial and experimental activities of practical reason," to
realize "a more complete and deliberate mastery over the imaginative and
institutional contexts of our activities," and thereby to reduce the
tension between "our need to participate in group life and our effort to
avoid the dangers of dependence and depersonalization that accompany such
engagement."
The more immediate concern, "[t]he great political issue before us,"
is whether the social democrats are right. Social democracy is the
"least oppressive" of existing political models; it is the "most
respectful of felt human needs, and therefore also most likely to attract the
most diverse support of the most thoughtful citizens." But the
social-democratic ideal, Unger says, is flawed. The social democrats, he
explains, like most other political protagonists in "the late twentieth
century North Atlantic countries," still accept a "mutually
repellent" but seemingly unavoidable trio:
[A]n ideal of private community, meant to be realized in the life of family
and friendship; an ideal of democratic participation and accountability,
addressed to the organization of government and the exercise of citizenship; and
an amalgam of voluntary contract and impersonal technical hierarchy or
coordination, suited to the practical world of work and exchange.
They also are imprisoned in false necessity and accordingly committed, or, as
"modest eclectics," simply resigned, to a politics of what is at best
limited "empowerment." Unger's program therefore diverges
from the social-democratic ideal in its advocacy of radically revised ways of
organizing market economies and democratic governments, in its search for the
institutional arrangements that further soften the contrast between
context-preserving routine and context-revising conflict, in its preference for
the styles of welfare guarantees that presuppose these institutional reforms
rather than compensating for their absence, and in its effort systematically to
connect involvement in local and workplace self-government with conflict over
the basic terms of life.
A sketch such as this cannot do justice to the extraordinary range and subtlety
of Unger's argument, although it does indicate the relentless level of
generality at which he almost always pursues it. Certainly, no such sketch can
do justice to the force of Unger's argument. Nevertheless, among the many
questions that his argument raises, one is clearly fundamental. If we accept
Unger's criticism of the thinness of the purported universal conceptions of
human nature in politics, and also accept that local conceptions are not
incorrigible, is Unger's the only alternative? I do not think it is. I want to
suggest that an alternative view of the relative importance of the
"passions" and the "interests" in politics does not, as
Unger says that it does, rule out what a modest eclectic might hope that a
social democracy can be.
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