 |
|
The Professor of Smashing: By Stephen Holmes [A review of Politics, a Work in Constructive Social Theory by Roberto Mangabeira Unger (Cambridge University Press, three volumes): False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, 653 pp., $59.50, $18.95 paper; Plasticity into Power: Comparative-historical Studies of the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success, 231 pp., $37.50, $10.95 paper; Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task, 256 pp., $39.50, $12.95 paper.] I. NOW THAT THE counterculture is fading from memory, someone has finally written a philosophical work summarizing its fondest aspirations. Roberto Unger first came to public attention more than a decade ago with Knowledge and Politics (1975) and Law in Modern Society (1976). As a professor at Harvard Law School, he has since allied himself with the Critical Legal Studies movement, recently publishing a manifesto on its behalf. Critical of both Marxism and liberalism, Unger quickly won a reputation as a heterodox but brilliant political theorist; in some circles, and despite his relative youth (he is 40), he has now attained the status of mastermind and sage. His new volumes--collectively titled Politics, a Work in Constructive Social Theory --all converge on the same defiant but hopeful conclusions. They are meant to be read together, although philosophers may be especially drawn to the methodological slant of Social Theory and social historians to the illustrative material analyzed in Plasticity into Power. The bulging second volume, False Necessity, is indisputably the centerpiece of the work. Replete with historical learning and practical suggestions, the entire book imparts a simple message: the professor of law hopes to "loosen constraints.' Promulgating a "gospel of plasticity,' Unger now advocates flexibility over rigidity, experiment over routine, disobedience over compliance, inventiveness over habit, improvisation over scripts, and the personal over the impersonal. Declaring "war against the tyranny of roles,' he exalts the "jumbling' or "permanent confusion' of social and sexual roles. In typical '60s fashion, he finds nothing more abhorrent than the status quo. If we follow his advice, we will "disrespect and destabilize custom and privilege,' refuse to play by the rules, explode stale conventions, tear down hierarchies, and decline work that discourages the expression of personal uniqueness. To usher in "a transfigured human reality,' we must undertake a mischievous activity called "context-smashing'--the sabotaging of all stable expectations. Our ultimate goal should be a "omplete remaking of society.' To fulfill "the radical project' we must not only slip our own chains, we must also "cleanse social life of its taint of enslavement.' In depicting his wished-for assault upon "all settled ties and preconceptions,' Unger employs a variety of synonyms for "samash,' including shatter, break, crack, dismember, pull apart, and trash. He also presses gentler words into service: dissolve, transform, disentrench, remake, revise, shake up, destabilize, wear down, resist, disturb, and even transcend. But his exhortation is always the same. We should "raise a storm,' accepting mankind's "vocation for indiscipline' and "turning subversion into a practical way of life.' Unger's paean to naughtiness is the flip side of his disdain for the establishment and his desire to shock conventional minds. Casting himself as the spokesman for "our unfulfilled longings,' he excogitates a social order in which everyday life will become "a condition for experimental freedom,' where everything is "up for grabs' and subject to "perpetual innovation.' Do you dread, above all else, slipping into a rut? If so, this is the book for you. The "repeated liquefaction of entrenched structure' will rinse away the difference between routine and revolution: everyday behavior will radically convulse all basic institutions, habits, and assumptions. Such volatility will enable us to realize both political and personal objectives. For one thing, privileged groups and inherited ethnic divisions will vanish. Politically, Unger's "redeemed society' will assume the form of "a mobilizational democracy committed to open up every feature of the social order to collective challenge and revision and to liquefy all rigid roles and hierarchies.' His image of personal fulfillment is equally sloshy and somewhat dreamier, involving not merely the abolition of envy and frustration, but also "the ability to entertain fantasies about possible forms of self-expression or association and to live them out.' In the widely circulated manuscript of this work, he had described his "special sort of happiness' quite racily as "the diurnal repetition for social life of what the Marquis de Sade recommended for sex: the strenuous enlargement of enacted possibilities.' Although he has discreetly deleted this phrase from the published text, his ambitions haven't changed: Unger still hopes to do for the daylight what Sade did for the night. WHY DOES Unger call himself a "superliberal'? Answering this question brings us to the heart of his position. Human beings are almost "passive automatons' of their cultural contexts and "faceless representatives of predetermined roles.' Almost, but not quite. Individuals can never be definitively robotized. Personality is always brimming with endless possibilities aching to be realized: "We are an infinite caught within the finite.' Our limitedness is due largely to inadequate social arrangements, which willful spirits can trash. Here lies the secret of Unger's superliberalism: he views society society consistently from "the perspective of the will.' He is interested in revolutionizing the polity and the economy principally as a means for "freeing subjective experience,' satisfying the individual's "longing for self-assertion' and releasing "the implicit boundlessness of personal subjectivity.' Primarily devoted to unbuttoned self-assertion, Unger also hopes for a "drastic reform' of intimate relations. Although he usually maintains his distance from advanced Western societies such as the United States, Unger admires our "radical experimentation with personal relations.' Intimacy in America remains "tainted,' however. To achieve "a heightened condition of plasticity' in personal relationships, we must "make ourselves more fully available to each other'--available as "originals,' not as off-the-shelf replicas of social stereotypes. The new intimacy will involve "radical mutual acceptance' and "a heightening of mutual vulnerability.' Groups as well as couples will be affected. In Knowledge and Politics, Unger defined community as "the political dequivalent of love.' He has subsequently distanced himself from communitarian ideals, as the individualistic turn of Politics suggests. But he can still write approvingly about a "cleansing' of solidarity. Empowered democracy will foster "a regenerate life in common,' that is, a purified form of solidarity that "draws our communal relations closer to love.' Purged of any trace of inherited group identity, such erotic belonging will never compromise the radical independence of the individual. If context-smashing requires disloyalty, so be it. While stultifying contexts thwart our potentials, "conventional' social scientists and historians pile insult upon injury, promoting the "sanctification of existing society,' or the fiction that things have to be the way they are. Until now, students of society have labored under the illusion that "to explain past or present situations' they had to assume that "these situations were or are necessary.' Politics exposes the error of their ways. Diagnosing the present as a necessary stage in a "compulsive sequence,' Marxism, too, commits an unpardonable crime against human freedom. Indeed, "false necessity' or "the identification of the actual with the possible' is a collective self-delusion of the human race. Here is the theme captured by the title of Unger's middle and pivotal volume: "We talk and act as if the established institutions were natural, necessary, and even holy.' An optimistically interpreted Freud serves Unger as a model in his effort to demolish this "idolatry of the actual,' to illuminate the darkness and dispel our collective illusions. The theorist-therapist will "demystify society' and thereby set us free. Unger's liberating message is that "everything is politics' (a slogan revived by Critical Legal Studies), that things can be other than they are. Born again by this revelation, we will cease being the "puppets' and begin to be the "architects' of our milieus. HAVING STUDIED the claim that "no one context can be our permanent home,' a reader might infer that Unger advocates context-hopping as a technique for realizing the multiple facets of our rich personalities. By skillfully plying the airways, for example, one and the same person can be a scholar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a political activist in Rio de Janeiro. But double lives are not at all what Unger has in mind. He is much less interested in a series of distinct human potentials realizable in different locales than in a single mighty potential: "our astonishing ability' to smash contexts. We cannot fulfill our "transformative vocation' by leaving one framework and joining another, but only by shattering and reshaping the framework we are in. Only context-smashing qualifies as real action, adequate to mankind's "longing for greatness.' In some ways, Unger's thinking is more aesthetic than political. Without irony, he describes "the transparent, created social world' he yearns to establish as "this joy, this dazzling game, this work of art.' He compares a revolutionary acquiring power while others die to a poet trying to pitch upon an elusive word. But among Unger's aestheticizing claims, none is more eye-catching than the following: in a mercurial and redeemed social order, the "ordinary person' will become "more like the poet, whose visionary heightening of expressed emotion may border on unintelligibility and aphasia.' Unger intends this as a positive recommendation, suggesting that he may have already achieved that coveted "freedom from the fear of the ridiculous' characteristic of truly "empowered' individuals. II. THAT THESE volumes are "visionary' should be clear. Yet Unger also has practical and theoretical ambitions. To those itching for change, he wants to offer not merely moral encouragement, but also "a guide to transformative practice.' Unger's constitutional proposals, to select one example, reflect his profound distaste for the "banal system of checks and balances' that paralyzes government and precludes bold reform. Our "demobilizing constitutionalism,' he laments, makes it "hard for a victorious party to seize the state or, having seized it, to execute its program rapidly and decisively.' To escape this frustrating predicament, he proposes a "constitutionalism of permanent mobilization,' which will keep society bubbling and somehow guarantee that majoritarianism is consistent with the greatest possible freedom to experiment. The most striking feature of this constitution is a new branch of government devoted to destabilizing "every aspect' of social life. Unger doesn't explain how such a branch could be effective if it were democratically accountable, or how it would be tolerable if it were not. He does say that all citizens will receive an ironclad guarantee of welfare support untouchable by officials or majorities, almost suggesting (for an instant) that rigidity can be a virtue rather than a vice. Unger finds markets acceptable only so long as they are power-free, that is, do not permit some people to use their economic resources to influence others unduly. His complex economic proposals include the abolition of inherited capital assets, public control over basic investment decisions, and continuous interventions by a confiscatory state to break up concentrations of wealth. A two-tiered system of lending banks will distribute public funds to teams of entrepreneurs, technicians, and workers. Each team will try to make a profit; but an everalert government will reclaim accumulated wealth whenever it swells beyond a certain point. Taking a decentralized form, reminiscent of petty commodity production, Unger's ideal economy will also be incredibly innovative and dynamic. Along with this "guide' to reform, Unger offers "a new understanding of society.' The subjects he surveys are surprisingly diverse. In the course of his speculations, he discusses marsupials, the crisis of feudalism, tank warfare, the funded public debt, stratigraphy, the analytic-synthetic distinction, nomadic civilizations, the origins of the cosmos, Sung dynasty China, the failings of neoclassical economics, Yugoslavia's self-management system, Euclidean geometry, and much, much more. Unsoiled by the smudge of false modesty, he begins numerous chapters with authoritative remarks about "much of history,' "the vast majority of historical situations,' "most societies of the past,' "all the forms of social life that have existed in history,' and "the experience of mankind.' From every topic and period, Unger pretends to draw encouragement for his radical program. (His loungeabout familiarity with esoteric knowledge is nicely conveyed by the word "remember' in the following sentence, referring to nothing previously discussed in the text: "Remember the Byzantine military farms--ktemata stratiotika, the Ottoman timariots, the Mughal zamindars, and the Aztec military life-tenants.') As the appended bibliographies demonstrate, Unger has drawn heavily on conventional historical and sociological research. But the entire work, especially Social Theory, reveals a surprisingly undifferentiated attitude toward fellow academics. He describes them variously as cowardly, naive, deluded, flaccid, asleep, confused, superstitious, and one-dimensional. They are collaborators, apologists, and traitors to freedom. He even calls them sterile and impotent, perhaps to underline his own "fecundity,' which is mentioned more than once. Indeed, Unger's portrait of his colleagues diverges in almost every respect from his picture of himself. IT WOULD nevertheless be a mistake to assume that such a polemical work exhibits no intellectual balance. Unger is scrupulously fair-minded about capitalism and communism, arguing that the Soviet Union is no freer than the United States. It is just as possible to reach "the true republic' by transforming America as by transforming Russia. He obviously feels a greater sympathy for the Third World than for either of the superpowers, however. Unfettered by enduring constitutions, Third World countries display an "exemplary instability.' Their citizens are especially lucky that rules for attaining political power remain "illdefined.' Brazil, in particular, seems full of promise--though Unger's patriotism does not make him wholly uncritical. He is merciless, for example, toward the "pathetic mimicry of foreign ideas' he encounters among Brazil's intellectual elite. But the edge of his razor is reserved for the United States. What he finds most repellent about America is the trivial nature of our "normal politics' (a phrase meant to echo Thomas Kuhn's "normal science'). Our best politicians seek only "worthless changes.' We are fixated on necessary but essentially moderate goals such as housing, food, and health care. We may hope to redistribute wealth, or to encourage more participation in politics; but we never dream the impossible dream, never attempt a radical transformation of the social order. Indeed, those who strive to improve the welfare state are "tinkerers.' Their efforts will only enable the despicable system to survive. Unger's attitude toward Marxism is more complex. He announces that Politics is a "leftist book,' as if the hyper-conventional left/right scheme should be accepted uncritically rather than smashed. Like Marx, he admires the anti-traditionalist, dynamic, and innovative powers of capitalism. He too suggests that civil society, the everyday world in which we live and work, should realize the universalistic and egalitarian ideals foreshadowed in liberal politics. And he also foresees the end of prehistory, the establishment of an unprecedented social world in which human beings become "masters' of their destiny. He foresees this brave new world but refuses to guarantee that it will arrive. Marx's gravest blunder was to attribute the coming of communism to iron necessity, thereby turning heroic revolutionaries into the marionettes of history. More devoted to human spontaneity than to inexorable progress, Unger refuses to predict the future. He is so certain of Marx's error on this question that he returns dozens of time, one might almost say compulsively, to lengthy denunciations of "compulsive sequence.' Indeed, the mileage he gets out of this obvious and conventional form of anti-Marxism is nothing short of stupefying. A more repetitive attack on repetitiveness is difficult to imagine. III. AS MY SUMMARY suggests, this book contains some obscurities, contradictions, and unanswered questions. Consider just a few of the more obvious puzzles and problems. Unger bafflingly identifies breaking a rule with changing a rule, as if disobedience were the same as reform. He advocates "cumulative' change while declaring that everything inherited must be smashed. He expounds endlessly on the ways flexibility can enhance survival, intimating inconsistently that endurance is an important value. He alternately admires and deplores capitalism's ruthless approach to failed economic experiments. He despises a society of "placeholders,' but hopes to understand himself "as a being with place.' He deprecates inherited group identity, while praising involuntary obligations, including "shared nationhood.' He declaims against inflexible arrangements, while inexplicably applauding the "lasting personal commitments' of marriage. He associates "empowerment' with extreme voluntariness and yet remarks, as if it were a bonus, that "experiences of empowerment have an addictive force.' Under the umbrella term "naturalistic social theory' he blurs together two quite dissimilar attitudes: the belief that moral ideals are immutable and the belief that actual institutions are immutable. He assumes throughout that context-smashing is inherently leftist, involving a successful demolition of elites, while admitting parenthetically that context-smashing can easily create unprecedented hierarchies of privilege and power. He asserts numerous times that if current arrangements did not have to become the way they are, then they do not have to be the way they are--as if irreversible processes could not be initiated by chance. Monotonously announcing the boldness of his insight into false necessity, he admits in passing that social theorists have always recognized it. And the cascade of contradictions doesn't cease here. While pouring contempt on social theory's traditional appeal to nature, Unger offers "the mutability of human nature' as a moral standard: we must construct a society that embodies and respects man's inborn destructive-creative powers. While spurning social transformation pursued in the name of static ideals, he upholds the "unbiased decision-procedure' as an unchanging goal of reform. He proposes a constitutional scheme for successor generations while striving "to weaken the tyranny of the present over the future.' He endorses Quine's criticism of the analytic-synthetic distinction, while uncritically accepting the closely related form-content distinction. His paradoxical, and therefore interesting, idea that "conflict' is a creative force is rendered tautological by his casual admission that "good' conflict must be free of animosity, violence, and a hardening of battle fronts. He makes changing the rules in the middle of the game sound agreeable by neglecting to ask what happens when each player changes the rules in a different manner. He never explains how fellow "transformers' will communicate with each other once they have destroyed the background assumptions that render mutual comprehension, including disagreement, possible. The main reason Unger rejects the status quo is that it does not permit human beings to be all that they could be, but the very same complaint can be leveled at any particular transformative effort: we could always transform the world in other ways. UNGER'S PENCHANT for idea jumbling is also illustrated by his attitude toward power. He manages to identify simultaneously with the winners and the losers, crying for the weak and laughing with the strong--an achievement not even Nietzsche could match. On the one hand, he reviles powerful elites who, throughout history, have successfully obstructed change and exploited their feebler companions. On the other hand, especially in the third volume, he indulges in a veritable cult of worldly success, arguing that power is a prize awarded to those most willing to smash their inherited contexts. Aware of this mind-wrenching disorder, Unger pre-emptively denigrates the value of internal coherence, claiming that "insight can outreach consistency.' This is a respectable position, I suppose, but it certainly proves grueling for the reader. The claim that we "can always discover more to be true than we can prove, verify, or even make sense of' implies that discomfort with unintelligible ideas is a sign of intellectual servility. But the difficulties presented by Politics cannot all be fairly laid on the poor reader's head. While criticizing innumerable social theorists, for example, Unger almost never names names. (Who actually says that basic social institutions must remain the way they are?) This omission makes it difficult to gain "critical distance,' that is, to exercise one's own small portion of "negative capability' on Unger's speculations. While trumpeting the extremism of his position, and even claiming that it will fundamentally change our intellectual situation, Unger also has a disconcerting tendency to interlard his text with offhand concessions to common sense. Sober remarks are dropped in passing, without being integrated into the basic argument, which would be pointless if it weren't shocking. He occasionally straightens his tie, for example, and poses as a sober older brother, offering sage counsel to younger and less seasoned leftists. Anarchistic or infantile "modernists,' he bodefully observes, hope to smash one context after another, refuse to "settle down,' and forever act "as if everything were up for grabs.' He supplements this amicable dissent, confusingly, with outright sympathy for their point of view. As you trail behind him on his long march, you will often find the distinction between his own position and the one ascribed to his immature brethren too subtle to discern. The only serious problem with infantile context-smashers, in truth, is their failure to recognize that we can invent "less imprisoning social contexts,' that is, institutions that cry out to be smashed and thus allow us to settle down without settling down. The cogency of this idea, distinguishing Unger from the anarchist, is less than perfectly clear. But why does Unger exaggerate his differences with infantile modernism? Perhaps he is thinking of public relations. His sympathy with the remote, his celebration of infinite possibilities, and his commitment only to social arrangements that have never had a chance to disappoint him--these are all unmistakable symptoms of romanticism, an outlook that, in an age that knows about the consequences of romanticism in politics, begs for a smoke screen. Occasional asides of avuncular chastisement, addressed to the lunatic fringe, may well serve as precisely this sort of distraction or decoy. IV. THE RIOT of inconsistency and the overdose of rhetoric aside, Unger's positions seems vulnerable to eight basic objections. Context-smashing is not an attractive basis for a moral doctrine. The destructive behavior Unger admires can, obviously, be good or bad, depending on the context being smashed and the replacements available. His suggestion that one context can be superior to another only by being easier to change is equally implausible. Culture cannot be adequately conceived as an iron lid slammed shut on an otherwise infinite personality. We would not be freer without it--whatever "superliberals' might imagine. The possibilities we value are, in part, creatures of cultural systems and social institutions. They cannot be generated spontaneously by the prodigality of the individual soul. If all stable expectations were smashed, both surprise and nonconformity would become impossible. You can shatter the brittle, but not the fluid. Thus, a progressive "liquefaction' of society might have the unintended effect of diminishing opportunities for the exercise of contextsmashing powers. Unger concedes as much, though again inconsistently, when he describes modern Western societies not only as easier but also as harder to change than more rigid societies of the past. For young children, the mentally unstable, the homeless, and other vulnerable individuals, context-smashing would be harmful, or redundant. Why disdain the anxieties of rootlessness? Elementary psychiatry suggests that it is not easy to maintain one's sanity in a condition of total flux. Unger parenthetically concedes that human beings need security, and that radical instability might deprive some people of some options. He also half-accepts the human desire to survive. But he displays no mercy at all for the timid wish to maintain one's "way of life.' Workers reluctant to retool are viewed with as much contempt as members of ethnic groups who stubbornly cling to an inherited identity. (The fierceness with which he attacks the institution of "job tenure' may tempt some readers to suggest a simple way for the professor to align his practice with his theory.) When a politician announces that we must go to war or submit to a tax increase, citizens are obliged to express their doubts. To that extent, Politics has a genuinely important, though not earthshaking, lesson to convey. By focusing on advantages reaped by elites, however, Unger makes his account of pseudo-inevitability much less interesting than it might otherwise be. After all, "I can't help it' is a fairly ubiquitous technique for enhancing individual freedom, as useful to subordinates as to superiors. And it isn't easy to imagine a human society in which such an excuse would never be deployed. False necessity may also result from a psychological drive to minimize guilt and frustration. To soothe a bad conscience, or to reconcile ourselves to straitened circumstances (that is, to reduce dissonance), we may tend to underestimate the alternatives actually available to us. Or we may turn a blind eye to various real possibilities because a surfeit of options is psychologically disorienting, impairing our ability to make rational comparisons and choices. Such "self-deception' is independent of plots by the powerful to dominate the weak. These are fairly obvious considerations, worth mentioning only because they surface nowhere in Unger's far from economical discussion, or rather scolding, of false necessity. We might also ask whether human beings can ever know precisely what can and cannot be done, neither over- nor underestimating the range of alternatives accessible to them. Unger, incidentally, neglects the harmful effects of overly optimistic assessments. He is certainly less worried about trying the impossible than about failing to try the possible. Never mind that scarce resources and even lives can be shamefully wasted when the unfeasible is considered feasible. Sensible and effective reform requires the reformer to gain a goothold in the actual institutions, beliefs, and ongoing social movements that Unger dismissively lumps together as "the given.' The civil rights movement invoked constitutional guarantees that had already been secured for the white majority. The women's movement echoes the civil rights movement, not smashing the past but trying to build upon it. Unger admits, inconsistently, that human beings cannot doubt, distrust, or attack everything at once; but his fundamental claim is that context-smashing is not context-dependent. The determined subversive does not defy one part of his context on the basis of another part, but rather defies his entire context (even if not all at once) on the basis of his infinite personality, never appealing to past successes but, at most, to past defeats. But surely such "autonomy' of social reformers from the given social world is debilitating rather than invigorating. It even leads Unger to assert that the moral attitude of reformers must be based on "groundless choice.' Such "a gratuitous act of commitment' may be compatible with superindividualistic self-assertion, but it does not provide a very promising basis for the societywide cooperation required for reform. The all-important concept of a "framework' presents serious problems. What does it mean to say that a framework "immunizes itself' against change? Does Unger want to suggest that an institutional and cultural context is a conscious agent able to perceive and defend its own interests? His examples, too, raise more questions than they answer. Conventional social scientists cannot understand the relation between savings and investment, apparently, because they are blind to the formative framework, that is, because they ignore other factors such as confidence in the consistency of government and the form and level of unemployment insurance. There is a core of healthy common sense in this analysis. But the question remains: Why affix a pretentious label such as "the framework' to wrongly neglected "other factors'? Are public trust and unemployment insurance part of the framework because they cannot themselves be influenced by other activities occurring "within' the framework? Do they shape without being shaped in turn? Or are they shaped solely by contextless fighting among context-free context-smashers? A stable expectation is not the worst thing one human being can inflict on another. The rigid is not the root of all evil. For finite beings, rigidities can be possibility-creating. That "rigid roles' are far from valueless is obvious to anyone who considers, say, the duties of a lifeguard. Unger may not approve of "rigid divisions' between science and religion and between religion and politics, but reasonable arguments can be adduced in their defense. Inherited hierarchies are useless; but a "rigid' chain of command can be convenient during emergencies, when democratic consultation may hamper prompt action, not to mention being essential for the retrospective apportionment of blame. Even "rigid routines,' which Unger assails with untrammeled fury, can be liberating, allowing us to focus on what really matters. Most important of all, grammar illustrates the way rigidities create flexibilities. (His interest in zoology apparently never led Unger to contemplate the advantages enjoyed by vertebrates over jellyfish.) Politics spurns "disempowering constraints.' As many philosophers have pointed out, however, the "rigid rules' of a game or language are not disabling, but enabling. V. PLASTICITY INTO POWER is largely concerned with the dynamics of state-building. Like Hegel and others, Unger argues that European states became more powerful as their citizens became more free. A mutual reinforcement of individualism and centralized sovereignty occurred in two ways: through the weakening of oppressive local magnates and through the flourishing of a free, monetized economy from which a government could extract funds without exhausting its tax base. His more original thesis, however, involves the uniqueness of the West. Why did European societies "take off' economically, rather than relapsing into a miserable "natural economy' as did all great agrarian-bureaucratic empires of the past? On the basis of a personal survey, Unger has gleaned the following lesson from European and, indeed, world history: to prevent economic stagnation, the central government must ally itself with "the vast masses of the population' against predatory elites. This is a moral lesson, of course, tantamount to: if you are good, you will succeed. (Here the Marxist influence on Politics comes most sharply into focus.) Rephrased for Third World audiences, the lesson reads: national prosperity and power do not require predatory elites or big estates. THE WORD "militant' is often used by the far left as a euphemism for "militaristic,' helping conceal the bloody-mindedness and addiction to martial virtues characteristic of wouldbe revolutionaries. As if to confirm our worst suspicions, one-half of Plasticity into Power is devoted to a near-rhapsodic chronicle of the strictly military advantages of social plasticity. At one point Unger threatens, in a phrase worthy of a bumper sticker, "plasticity or death.' About tradition-bound peoples who fail to adapt, he writes: "Their defeat pleases as much as it instructs.' He describes Abel Gance's Napoleon as "the great hero, the man of will, embodying to the highest degree the rage of transcendence and the transformative vocation.' And he looks forward expectantly to the time when the deviant will become "dominant' and "triumphant.' By recommending a "transformation of hierarchies of values' and apotheosizing "the transformative will,' he also invokes Napoleon's admirer, Nietzsche. Revealing the voluntaristic core of his superliberalism, Unger even remarks that the wearisome reform cycles afflicting capitalist and communist societies alike "insult the primacy of the will.' But he makes his most interesting Nietzschean gesture during a discussion of the "mobile and warlike peoples' who are able to revitalize faltering agrarian civilizations by conquest. The way he describes this injection of new vitality is quite telling: "The rule of the nomads over the agrarian peoples was sometimes only a predatory extension of dominion over animal flocks to the mastery of human subjects.' The mastery that Unger usually endorses, of course, is exercised over social contexts, not over fellow human beings. But his image of "individual and collective self-affirmation,' superficially peaceful, is deeply colored by his appreciation of conquest. His affectionate reference to "epic grandeur' makes this clear, as does his desire to satisfy "our hidden and insulted longing for greatness.' Ultimately, or so the extraordinary concluding sentence of False Necessity suggests, he hopes to mingle the excitement of battle with the honey of self-love: "What more could we ask of society than a better chance to be both great and sweet?' That Unger could resort to such language is deeply disturbing. That he could take "will' as his starting point, aestheticize political violence, shower derision on the boring bourgeois world, and hope for a dramatic uncorking of stifled human possibilities--all without clearly distinguishing his own position from that of political romantics, not to mention fascists--is simply beyond comprehension. UNGER'S confusing attitude toward power (why doesn't the historical triumph of predatory elites provide evidence of their superior flexibility?) is obscured even further by his book's conclusion, where the resolute transformer retracts much of what he has previously said. Plasticity, it turns out, is not good in itself; it is only capable of producing good results when "harnessed' to a "higher social ideal.' Not extreme freedom alone, but also extreme oppression, may result from the program advocated here. Shattering entrenched structures is good or bad, depending on what happens next. After jeering at his colleagues for offering so little, Unger serves up the limp claim that radical efforts to improve society do not have to fail. Unger initially rebukes "naive historians' for failing to notice major discontinuities in the course of social evolution. By the end of Politics, however, this reproach appears to be a classic case of shooting the messenger. What irks him about historians is not their obliviousness to frameworks, but their failure to provide social activists with grounds for hope. Not the historian, but history itself, is "narcoleptic.' Despite his eagerness to extrapolate moral lessons from a reconstruction of the past, he complains mournfully of "the tedious, degrading rhythm of history.' By reporting the past, more or less accurately, conventional historians intimate that mankind will probably never achieve a complete mastery over events. They focus on unintended consequences, always an embarrassment to reformers; and they draw attention to the chronological narcissism of revolutionaries who wildly overestimate the degree to which they have broken with the past. As every reader of Sade knows, many "human
potentials' can be vile and worthy of repression. A social order that prevents
people from expressing everything they feel (for example, racism) may not be
wholly inhumane. Unger undervalues such considerations. But even more puzzling
is the consolation he draws from the thought that everything is possible. The
assertion that society "always stands at the edge of a cliff' is offered as a
promise, not as a threat. No one foresaw the Nazis, it is true, neither liberals
nor Marxists. Having delivered predictive social science some near-fatal blows,
history no doubt has further surprises in store. But to view cliff-hanging as an
occasion for glee is unquestionably premature. |