From Civnet’s Journal for a Civil Society, May-July 1999, vol. 3, no. 3

Review of Roberto Unger's Democracy Realized

By Anne Kornhauser

As we reach the close of the twentieth century, much of what marked this age of extremes, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm has dubbed it, is up for grabs: the future of the welfare state; the shape of post-Cold War military policy; the structure of the global economy; and the organization of emerging democracies. Although they may seem to have little in common, what all these developments point to is an especially rich opportunity for social, political, and institutional experimentation.

Today Roberto Unger's time may finally have come.

For the past twenty years, even before most of these problems presented themselves, social and legal theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger has wanted us to see ourselves as standing at just such a crossroads. He has wanted us, that is, to engage in a kind of giant leap of faith by imagining that, through the power of political action, existing institutional and political arrangements could be thoroughly revolutionized and in the process made considerably more democratic—but without the complications, not to say violence, of an actual revolution. In more certain times, however, Unger's case for a major institutional overhaul was a hard one to make. And, despite his status as a Harvard law professor, he was little listened to outside the rarified world of social and political theorists. Today, however, Roberto Unger's time may finally have come.

It is not simply that Unger, a Brazilian native best known for his romantic utopian vision of human emancipation and democracy, has become more practical, that is, moved closer to the world, although that is certainly the case. The world has also moved closer to Unger. It has provided him with a situation he has long been hoping for: the conditions for political and economic experimentation but in non-crisis-ridden times. This confluence of events makes Unger's recent book, Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative, well worth wrestling with. In it, Unger, notoriously one of the most abstract social theorists writing today, turns his longtime embrace of philosophical pragmatism in new, more programmatic directions.

In essence, Unger limns the outlines of what might be called a post-welfare-state democratic politics. It is a post-welfare-state politics because it rejects some of the welfare state's fundamental assumptions, such as the necessary trade-off between social protection and the free market, and some of its key policy prescriptions, such as a heavy reliance on wealth redistribution through progressive taxation. Unger does not, however, reject the basic goals of the welfare state: greater equality and personal autonomy. Rather, he significantly complicates the picture as to how these can be achieved and whether the relationship between the two is as straightforward as some might think. There is no reason, for example, that we cannot simultaneously increase government activism and free enterprise, Unger suggests. The key is in rethinking what is meant by both of these terms and the institutions that support them.

Unger limns the outlines of what might be called a post-welfare-state democratic politics.

Perhaps in part in response to critics who have lamented the opacity of his previous efforts, Unger offers in this latest work a virtual manifesto for "deepening democracy," which for him means breaking down existing hierarchies and social roles, reducing economic inequality, enhancing people's imaginative and critical capacities, and increasing popular political participation. This is to be accomplished, in turn, through reforms in the institutions of the market, the state, and civil society. In calling for such reforms, Unger, as he has in the past, positions himself as a sympathetic critic of both Marxism and liberalism. He rejects the revolutionary and deterministic vision of Marxism and liberalism's reliance on a neutral state and neutral institutions. Politics always has a purpose and therefore must promote a particular way of life. For him, the purpose of politics is to allow individuals to flourish, particularly as constructive critics of existing social and political arrangements. Politics must also be relentlessly pluralist. "No one should have to live in a society in which public policy and institutional arrangements express the outlook of a particular part of the people against other parts."

Unger's ecclectic book, which ranges from abstract theoretical discussion to thirteen "theses" of reform, is innovative and provocative but also occasionally problematic. It too often reads as if the practical suggestions are grafted onto his theory. Even as he insists that "practical progress" and "individual emancipation" can peacefully, if problematically, coexist, and that "we must speak in the two languages of interest calculation and political prophecy"—Unger never gives an adequate account of how to handle the tension between shorter-term institutional correctives and longer-term emancipatory politics. Unger maintains that it is a tension with which people interested in promoting democracy must live, but his willingness to rely on some of the key institutions that he wishes to reform—such as the central state—as the very means for reform can be troubling.

Politics always has a purpose and therefore must promote a particular way of life.

The one thread that clearly unites the theoretical and practical aspects of this book is well worth attending to: the centrality of institutions. Unlike, say, the Greeks, contemporary democratic theorists and practitioners have tended to ignore institutions in favor of such things as values and identity. Unger, who is informally advising Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the midst of Brazil's current economic difficulties, intones that unlike the institutionally conservative social democrats and neoliberals, "progressives" must look beyond "the established institutional framework." But his message is not simply that we should look to the structure and the goals of institutions if we wish to promote democracy; it is the much more profound point that we need to rid ourselves of the pervasive assumption that current institutional arrangements are necessarily the best ones. The corollary of this is that significant institutional change can be practical and achievable, rather than simply wide-eyed utopianism.

Institutions as diverse as parliaments and banks can be changed significantly or even scrapped entirely without threatening stability or necessitating a crisis. Moreover, this can be done democratically, "from the bottom up" as well as from the top down. Even such vaunted institutional mechanisms as checks and balances should be "up for grabs." For they may not, Unger warns us, be the best way to achieve democracy. (In fact, checks and balances tend to inhibit democratic experimentalism by leading to stasis.) Moreover, the very process of institutional experimentation is crucial to democracy as it empowers individuals by providing an important source of knowledge about the possibilities for arranging political and social life.

For Unger, then, no current institution is sacred, not representative government, not existing forms of private property, and not the law, at least as it is currently structured. But if institutions are destiny, bureaucracy is decidedly not. For the most part, Unger wishes to decentralize existing institutions and create new ones at the local level. But at other times he proposes (in the name of decentralization and a more participatory democracy!) adding huge structures to the central government, such as a new, quasi-judicial branch of government that would enforce social and economic rights, including at the local level and in civil society—without fully grappling with the problems that centralized mechanisms may pose for his populist vision. (Another example of centralization in his program is his proposal for the automatic unionization of all workers. What sort of structure, if any, would coordinate this sort of labor organization?)

Although he is nominally concerned with reforms in the institutions of the market economy, the polity, and civil society, it is the former to which he devotes by far the greatest attention. Perhaps with his eye on the gross poverty of many Brazilians, Unger lays great stress on fundamental material well-being as an important attribute of democracy. But he repudiates the welfare-statist vision as to how this is to be achieved and he cautions that too much attention to equality can detract from or even clash with equally important goals, including what he calls "individual emancipation." Egalitarianism, he insists, "needs to be put in its place." Specifically, he contends that the redistributionist policies of the welfare state are not the best means of achieving economic growth and productivity, which are necessary requisites for the good life for individuals.

While the call for economic growth as a solution to maldistribution of wealth and poverty is hardly new, Unger has some tantalizing ways of conceptualizing the mechanisms of growth and the institutions undergirding the highly productive economy that he prizes. Rather than jettisoning redistributionist policies altogether, Unger wishes to supplement them with structural changes in the economy. These include the virtual banning of private inheritance in favor of social inheritance mechanisms into which the rich pay; the encouragement and even requirement of private saving; a broad consumption tax; the unification of all private and public pension funds, some of which would then be used as venture capital; and, of course, the additional branch of government to enforce positive rights.

If institutions are destiny, bureaucracy is decidedly not. 

Much of Unger's attention is directed toward increasing access to what he calls the "vanguard," or advanced sectors of the economy, which are to be found, in varying degrees, in both older industrial democracies and emerging democracies. These sectors are characterized by greater degrees of capital investment; a higher premium on knowledge or skill; unionization; and full-time work, often with the opportunity for advancement. Unger contrasts the "vanguard" with the "rearguard," those economic sectors characterized by low- or unskilled work, part-time jobs, little or no unionization, and a lack of protection and investment by the government and private sector alike. At the level of the economy (through targeted investment via independently administered venture capital funds), the government (through laws that encourage the growth and unionization of these sectors and that charter the investment funds), and civil society (through proper training and education), these privileged economic sectors must be fostered.

From one vantage point, proposals such as these do not sound all that different from existing efforts in the United States and elsewhere to provide for worker retraining, to subsidize high technology enterprises, etc. From another vantage point, from the vantage point of institutions, Unger's proposals are far-reaching, and at times even farfetched. But they are only farfetched, Unger would be quick to tell us, if we're looking through the lenses of extant institutions and of assumptions about what is politically possible. If we are hopeful and imaginative enough, as any good experimental democrat should be, then we might well want to give some of them a try.

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