Roberto Unger is the Philosopher the Left Needs

“Whether one buys into his system, the Left needs more thinkers with Unger’s courage and intellectual ambition.”

Introduction

“A deepened, high-energy democracy does not seek to replace the real world of interests and of interest-bearing individuals with the selfless citizen and with the all-consuming theater of public life. It is not a flight into republican purism and fantasy. It wants to enhance our ordinary powers, enlarge the scope of our ordinary sympathies and ambitions, and render more intense our ordinary experience. It seeks to do so by diminishing the distance between the ordinary moves we may within institutional and ideological contexts take for granted and the extraordinary initiatives by which we challenge and change pieces of those contexts. Its agent and its beneficiary are one and the same: the real thing—the frail, self-interested, longing individual in the flesh, the victim of circumstance whom no circumstance can ever completely or definitively confine.”

Roberto Unger, The Left Alternative.

To do genuinely interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work is the goal of many scholars. Some achieve it better than others. But to engage in truly systematic and all-encompassing scholarship almost seems anachronistic, not to mention a trifle arrogant. Given the complexities involved in mastering even a single discipline, who could have the audacity to claim expertise across a great number of them? Few since Hegel have even tried, and this has often led to considerable disappointment.

Such ambition and systematicity, not to mention the borderline audacity that underlies it, is part of the thrill that comes from reading any book by Brazilian philosopher Roberto Unger. Where others might painstakingly tie themselves into knots justifying their right to engage in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work, Unger simply steamrolls over all objections to think and write about whatever he wishes. In many, this might simply be intellectual overreach. But Unger is the rare exception. His seemingly encyclopedic capacity for philosophical systematization has moved from impressive to genuinely inspiring in his recent work. Most importantly, I feel that Unger’s philosophy, or one rather like it, is what the left needs to lift itself out of the skepticism of what Alain Badiou helpfully calls the democratic materialism of postmodern theorizing. He provides a fascinating and genuinely inspiring call to arms for those keen to genuinely transform the world.