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Northwestern
University Law Review, Winter, 1988, 2 NW. U. L. Rev. 335
Unger, Castoriadis,
and the Romance of a National Future
By Richard Rorty
Roberto
Mangabeira Unger is a Brazilian philosopher. "Brazilian philosophy"
has as little resonance as "American philosophy" did a hundred years
ago. But in 1882 Walt Whitman, comparing Carlyle's "dark fortune-telling of
humanity and politics" with "a far more profound horoscope-casting of
those themes -- G. F. Hegel's," wrote as follows:
Not the least mentionable part of the case,
(a streak, it may be, of that humor with which history and fate love to contrast
their gravity) is that although neither of my great authorities [Carlyle and
Hegel] during their lives consider'd the United States worthy of serious
mention, all the principal works of both might not inappropriately be this day
collected and bound up under the conspicuous title: Speculations for the use
of North America, and Democracy there, with the relations of the same to
Metaphysics, including Lessons and Warnings (encouragements too, and of the
vastest,) from the Old World to the New.
Try pasting that title on your copy of Unger's Politics, having first
altered "North America" to "South America," "Old
World" to "Northern Hemisphere," and "New" to
"Southern." It is not inappropriate. Though few of our great
authorities presently consider Brazil worthy of serious mention, spaces left
blank in the minds of one century's authorities often get filled in, quite
quickly and quite surprisingly, during the next. Try beginning your reading of
Unger's book with pages 64-79 of the first volume ("The Exemplary
Instability of the Third World" and "A Brazilian Example").
Remember that Unger -- though he has put in many years of hard work here in
North America, changing the curricula of many of our law schools and the
self-image of many of our lawyers -- is a man whose mind is elsewhere. For him,
none of the rich North Atlantic democracies are home. Rather, they are places
where he has gathered some lessons, warnings, and encouragements.
Whitman prefaced Leaves of Grass with a comparison between the
closed-down character of Europe and the openness of the American future:
Let the age and wars of other nations be
chanted, and their eras and characters be illustrated, and that finish the
verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative, and
has vista.
In Democratic Vistas he urges that psalm has barely begun:
Far, far, indeed, stretch, in distance, our
Vistas! How much is still to be disentangled, freed! How long it takes to make
this American world see that it is, in itself, the final authority and reliance!
As his book goes along, Whitman continually looks from the gloriously possible
to the sickeningly actual -- from the American future to the facts of the Gilded
Age -- and back again. His naive hope invariably prevails over his sophisticated
disgust. Compare Unger on Brazil in 1985:
Indefinition was the common denominator of
all these features of the life of the state. . . . All this indefinition could
be taken as both the voice of transformative opportunity and the sign of a
paralyzing confusion. At one moment it seemed that new experiments in human
association might be staged here; at the next, that nothing could come out of
this disheartening and preposterous blend of structure, shiftlessness, and
stagnation.
Again,
At this time in world history, an attitude
once confined to great visionaries had become common among decent men and women.
They could no longer participate in political struggle out of a simple mixture
of personal ambition and devotion to the power and glory of the state. They also
had to feel that they were sharing in an exemplary experiment in the remaking of
society. A person who entered Brazilian politics in this spirit wanted his
country to do more than rise to wealth and power as a variant of the societies
and polities of the developed west. He wished it to become a testing ground for
. . . the options available to mankind.
To get in the right mood to read passages like these, we rich, fat, tired North
Americans must hark back to the time when our own democracy was newer and leaner
-- when Pittsburgh was as new, promising, and problematic as Sao Paulo is now.
Irving Howe describes "the American newness" of one hundred and fifty
years ago as a time when "people start to feel socially invigorated and
come to think they can act to determine their fate." He continues
bleakly: "What is it like to live at such a time? The opposite of what it
is like to live today."
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