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Northwestern University Law Review,
Summer 1987,
81 Nw. U.L. Rev. 817
Radical Politics in a New Key?
By
Tony Judt
In the introduction to
Politics, Professor Unger notes that the defeat of the radical project has
produced an awareness that nothing has to be the way it is, combined with a
"conviction that nothing important can be changed by deliberate collective
action." This apparently devastating combination of the more pessimistic
strands of ethical voluntarism and naturalistic social analysis leaves us,
according to Unger, at an impasse. We must somehow break clear of a style of
social understanding which explains mankind as helpless puppets of the worlds
they inhabit and the forces which made them. The problem, however, is that we
must do so without abandoning the insight we have gained into the identity of
those forces, without which action, however morally informed, stands in serious
risk of proving futile, at best.
Unger's book is a polemic against "deep-structure social analysis."
Nonetheless, he admits that the Marxist version of such analysis has indeed
provided the tools for remaining faithful to Marx's own anti-naturalistic
intentions. Consequently, he retreats to the earlier assertion of radical
analysis: everything is contextual and all contexts can be broken. His point is
that we should not deny the constraints upon us, but should rather dispel the
illusions which prevent us from seeing them as constraints.
Whether there is any more real coherence in this line of argument than in the
ancient assertions of Engels and others about men being both free and yet
determined ("in the final analysis") by material forces is far from clear. Unger
suggests that rather than create another world to realize our dreams, we should
do the undreamt of in this world. However, this is a wish that cannot be
fulfilled without some further thought along what he would call "old-fashioned"
lines. It is not enough to dispel naturalistic illusions in order to create a
psychological space in which we can feel free: we still need reasons for
believing that our actions will result in outcome A (or, at least, that
they will not result in outcome B). Perhaps this was less true in the
last century, when such criticisms of the naturalistic fallacies might have been
well taken, but recent history enjoins us to be a trifle more cautious about
doing the "undreamt of" -- at least it speaks thus to the fortunate residents of
Western Europe and North America.
It is not, however, my purpose in this Essay to investigate the practical
plausibility of Unger's own "frankly speculative" writings. What interests me is
the remarkable extent to which their appearance coincides with certain
developments within the radical spectrum of European politics. A closer
inspection of these developments may prove more useful as a guide to the real
implications of rethinking the radical project in this way.
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