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Making the Friendly World Behave By William Connolly [Review of Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory, by Roberto Mangabeira Unger. New York: Cambridge University Press. Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task. A Critical Introduction to Politics. 256 pp. Cloth, $39.50. Paper, $12.95. False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy. Part I of Politics. 653 pp. Cloth, $59.50. Paper, $18.95. Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies of the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success. Variations on Themes of Politics. 231 pp. Cloth, $37.50. Paper, $10.95.] Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a restless visionary. In 1975 he appeared on the American scene, as if from nowhere, with the publication of ''Knowledge and Politics.'' That book sketches the ideal of an organic community that deserves the allegiance of its members because it discerns a higher direction in nature. While continuing to write prolifically and provocatively, Mr. Unger, who teaches law and social theory at Harvard University, has participated in the founding of a new movement in legal theory called Critical Legal Studies in the United States and in the recent debate about the political future of his native country, Brazil. He has also corrected his own vision. His three new volumes - devoted to a reconstruction of social theory, a detailed scheme for democratic empowerment and a comparative analysis of economic and military prowess – show that he thinks his first vision distorted. It represented a species of what he now calls ''naturalism,'' confining life by presenting one particular institutional context as necessary, fixed or natural. Mr. Unger now sees every
stable set of institutions as ''frozen politics.'' His project is to melt down
each social framework until its political character and susceptibility to
transformation become apparent to people living in it. Freedom as rising to
highest human fulfillment now gives way to freedom as mastery over the contexts
that form us: ''We are our fundamental practices. But we are also the permanent
possibility of revising them,'' he says. Productivity, innovation, empowerment,
reconstruction, experimentation, context-breaking and self-assertion become key
terms in the Unger lexicon. ''Politics'' soars into the rarefied stratosphere of social theory, striving to realize the highest aspirations of modernity itself. Mr. Unger is thus best understood in relation to contemporaries who reach for similar heights, such as the European thinkers Hans Blumenberg, Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault. Mr. Blumenberg has traced how those premodern philosophies in the West that assumed there is a providential God destroyed their own credibility as they tried to perfect themselves, leaving the modern age with no option but to adopt the principle of ''self-assertion'' in its transactions with nature. Mr. Unger radicalizes this principle of individual and collective assertion, striving to bring modernism to completion by eliminating every unnecessary limit to human agency. Mr. Habermas also rejects providential readings of the world, repudiating even the residues of providence clinging to the idea of the self-regulating market or the harmonious community; he then formulates procedures for attaining rational consensus so that the absence of a higher purpose in nature will not reduce politics to nihilistic struggles. Mr. Unger concurs with that idea, but he replaces the quest for consensus with the search for a set of institutions that will extend diversity while remaining perpetually open to revision and reconstitution. Finally, Foucault replaced the notion of authority, solidity and realization with power, contingency and artifice; he even construed the individual as an artifact of institutional power rather than as the natural shape human beings assume. Like Foucault, Mr. Unger emphasizes the constructed character of social life, but, unlike Foucault, he converts this condition into an opportunity to bring human power over the conditions of existence to a pitch of perfection unimagined. To clear the way for his vision, Mr. Unger breaks down a series of prejudices that govern social theory today. He targets ''naturalism,'' ''deep-structure theory'' and ''positivism'' in this way: deep-structure theory, exemplified by Marxism, treats society as an indivisible whole and thus denies that social life can be reformed fundamentally through creative recombinations of economic, political and constitutional systems. Naturalism assumes there is one right order a society should strive to approximate. Positivism serves as a surrogate for naturalism and deep theory together. It explains particular social conflicts by treating the larger framework within which they occur as the unchangeable background of all social relations. It thus fosters tacit belief in the indivisibility and natural legitimacy of whatever social context it occurs in. The most radical politics it can imagine is a modest version of social democracy. Those critiques clear the way for Mr. Unger's ambitious project of institutional reconstruction. Since its radicalism resides in its details, the project resists brief summary, but one example may reveal its texture: Mr. Unger reconstructs the property right into something that bears only a family resemblance to the one we know. To promote economic equality, accessibility to capital and product innovation, he would set up a rotating capital fund from which floating teams of entrepreneurs, technicians and workers could draw. Then, ''once certain limits of personal enrichment and enterprise investment are reached, the additional capital goes back to the original capital fund for investment.'' This microsystem would stand in a complex relation of coordination and competition with a series of other microsystems. However one views the general objective of the larger system, Mr. Unger's presentations at the microsystem level often provide food for thought. The general idea is to enhance the flexibility of governing institutions so that they become effective instruments of individual and collective agency. The ideal is not to achieve life without context (though that may be the dream behind the ideal); it is to establish contexts which ''diminish the extent to which a preestablished, unchallengeable scheme of social roles and ranks shapes our practical and passionate dealings,'' making these contexts ''more fully open to identification, challenge and revision.'' The key to this project is the radical extension of ''plasticity'': ''The paramount condition of material progress becomes the plasticity of social life: the relative ease with which people can subject their forms of exchange, of machine design and work organization to the logic of problem solving.'' One way to achieve plasticity in institutions and people is through dictatorship. A preferable way is to build it ''into decentralized and participatory institutions that minimize the stranglehold individuals or groups may impose on the . . . resources of society.'' From Mr. Unger's point of view, then, the perfection of plasticity is a precondition for the perfection of democracy. But even if we think extreme plasticity is attainable (ignoring for the moment resistances to it in nature, in the finiteness of human beings and in the international web of economic transactions), it would intensify one part of the democratic ideal by sacrificing another. It would equalize conditions of existence and perfect collective agency by converting individuals into pliable material to be placed at the disposal of whatever priority is chosen democratically. In such a system, the individual would be absolute agent in one respect and disposable being in another. That double extremism would establish an order in which microstructures of regulation and surveillance would render resistant selves docile and responsive to shifting norms. Perhaps Mr. Unger thus inadvertently reveals what we must do to ourselves to pursue the modern dream of mastery all the way. Mr. Unger has answers to objections of this sort. Indeed, he has invented institutions to deal with every contingency and objection one can imagine. In this case the individual is protected by ''immunity rights'' (and the right to use political pressure to bring about change). But as I read them, immunity rights protect each person from nondemocratic coercion; they do not protect against plastification by democratic means. The very dream of freedom through radical mastery presupposes a plastic world populated by elastic people. And once one juxtaposes human experiences of suffering, sickness, perversity, madness and mortality against Mr. Unger's descriptions of the reconstructed order as fluid, flexible and pliable, it becomes clear how much dreamwork must be done to purify this vision. Mr. Unger's vision of freedom as human mastery over context requires him to invent a plethora of schemes to transform every contingency into an opportunity, followed by secondary schemes to insure that no new opportunity will be misused. Hence the disorderly mass of introductions, reintroductions, reiterations and reconsiderations in these volumes as Mr. Unger scrambles to contain the new contingencies generated by each successive stage of his project. We get all these words hurled against the stubborn fact of contingency but no discourse on the paradoxical relation between contingency and mastery itself. The early Unger and the new Unger share a single demand. Let us call it ontological narcissism: the insistence that the world itself be predisposed to us in its fundamental composition, either by providing a direction we can follow or by being intrinsically amenable to our consummate dreams of mastery. In this sense Mr. Unger has traversed the continuum within which modern dreams are enclosed. If he is as restless a thinker as he seems to be, his experience with two polar positions on the same continuum might propel him eventually to come to terms in new ways with limits and dangers to mastery in a world that is contingent through and through. Whether Mr. Unger retains his vision or corrects it again, the unusual combination of theoretical acuity and detail in these volumes is a brilliant contribution to social thought. Each time Mr. Unger offers a new proposal, settled assumptions and priorities are questioned with new intensity. The rapid accumulation of such proposals exposes the finely spun threads binding the prosaic world of political reform to the rarefied heights of theoretical imagination. Finally, the relentless specification of a vision that most moderns share inchoately exposes precisely what people must do (and believe) to pursue freedom through mastery. This freedom may not be able to bear its own reflection after looking into the mirror Mr. Unger holds up to it. William Connolly teaches
political theory at Johns Hopkins University. His books include ''Politics and
Ambiguity'' and the forthcoming ''Political Theory and Modernity.'' |