Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory is a 1987 book by Brazilian philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. In the book, Unger sets out a theory of society as artifact, attempting to complete what he describes as an unfinished revolution, begun by classic social theories such as Marxism, against the naturalistic premise in the understanding of human life and society. Politics was published in three volumes: False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, the longest volume, is an explanatory and programmatic argument of how society might be transformed to be more in keeping with the context-smashing potential of the human imagination; Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task, is a "critical introduction" that delves into issues of social science underpinning Unger's project; and Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success, is a collection of three historical essays illuminating the theoretical points Unger advanced in the first two volumes. In 1997, an abridged, one-volume edition of Politics was issued as Politics, The Central Texts, edited by Zhiyuan Cui.
Volume 1: False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy
In False Necessity, Unger presents both an explanatory theory of society and a program for the reform of society as a radical democracy that respects the ability of human beings continually to outreach, subvert, and remake their contexts. Unger proposes an "empowered democracy" that is structured so that it is maximally open to revision, a form of organization Unger calls "structure-revising structure." As Unger explains, "[a]s an explanatory theory of society, False Necessity seeks to free social explanation from dependence upon the denial of our freedom to resist and to remake our forms of social life. It carries to extremes the thesis that everything in society is politics, mere politics...." Unger argues that "the best hope for the advancement of the radical cause—the cause that leftists share with liberals—lies in a series of revolutionary reforms in the organization of governments and economies and in the character of our personal relations."
The explanatory theory in False Necessity focuses on cycles of reform and retrenchment in the West after World War II—particularly the repetitive nature of ordinary social conflict—in which there seem to be few options for major social change. Radical reform movements seem inevitably to fail even when they manage to achieve control of the government, due to a combination of business disinvestment and the bickering and jockeying for advantage among different groups of workers. Unger advances a hypothesis and analysis of a formative contexts that explain these stubborn cycles of reform and retrenchment. Formative contexts include the institutional arrangements and imaginative presuppositions that shape people's routines, and give certain groups mastery over the wealth, power, and knowledge in society. Unger lays a groundwork for the programmatic argument by analyzing certain possibilities in the state and in the microstructure of society—the extension of rights to guarantee the inviolability of the individual against government oppression and to meet basic material needs; the patron-client relationship as an example of a replacement of the impersonal by the personal; and a flexible variant of rationalized collective labor as a mode of work organization that breaks down the barrier between task-definers and task-executors in the workplace. Unger employs the concept of negative capability to describe the quality of freedom that emerges from liberating ourselves from rigid roles and hierarchies that compose part of society's formative contexts, and notes that one limitation on remaking contexts is the difficulty of combining institutions embodying different levels of negative capability into a single context. Unger concludes the explanatory section by setting forth an institutional genealogy of contemporary formative contexts and a theory of context making, both of which offer insight that can be used in remaking society.
In the programmatic section of False Necessity, Unger seeks to merge the modernist visionary's criticism of personal relations with the leftist's critique of collective institutions, in a program for empowered democracy. Despite the natural affinity between modernism and leftism, according to Unger, these two movements have been separated for too long, to the detriment of transformative politics. Unger justifies empowered democracy as the system that will embody the "superliberalism" that Unger sees as the surest way to bring about human empowerment, in a state that is not hostage to faction and where society is an artifact of will, not a product of institutional fetishism adhering to past compromises and outmoded institutions. Unger describes the "transformative movement" in its quest for empowered democracy, and sketches the principles that would inform the empowered democracy as he envisions it: institutions that are less plagued by deadlock, that decentralize the exercise of power, that represent overlapping functions, and are designed to lead to swift resolution of impasse. The institutions that embody these principles include a rotating capital fund giving broad access to society's investment capital to teams of workers, a series of innovative rights (such as market rights, immunity rights, destabilization rights, and solidarity rights) that guarantee the individual's dignity, security, and right to participate fully in the economy and government of society and would be enforced by government departments charged with intervening to destabilize unjust accumulations of wealth and power.
Unger completes the programmatic argument by describing a "cultural-revolutionary counterpart to the institutional program," arguing that such a cultural revolution is necessary since politics always comes down to the relations of individuals to each other. Finally, Unger describes the "spirit" of the constitution of empowered democracy as embodied in three principles: as a superstructure that has a structure-destroying effect; as a form of empowerment that allows us to loosen the bonds of our contexts over our activities and undermines any belief in a canonical list of forms of association between people; and as a kind of society that fulfills "the desire to do justice to the human heart, to free it from indignity and satisfy its hidden and insulted longing for greatness in a fashion it need not be fearful or ashamed of."
Volume 2: Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task
In Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task, subtitled "A Critical Introduction to Politics," Unger lays out the theoretical background of Politics with a critical assessment of the situation of social thought, specifically by examining and describing the history and failures of classical social theory which Unger seeks to remedy in Politics. Unger describes the trajectory of social theory in the twentieth century as one in which the projects of liberalism and socialism went part of the way toward liberating people from false necessity, but he contends that "no one has ever taken the idea of society as artifact to the hilt." Unger describes the situation in the late twentieth century, the time during which he was writing Politics, as "a circumstance of theoretical exhaustion and political retrenchment," which he seeks to redefine as "a gathering of forces for a new and more powerful assault upon superstition and despotism."
The theoretical framework that Unger offers, as a substitute for classical social theory, is one that rejects naturalistic and historicist assumptions that view us as "helpless puppets of the social worlds we build and inhabit or of the lawlike forces that have supposedly brought these worlds into being." Unger maintains that his programmatic arguments
reinterpret and generalize the liberal and leftist endeavor by freeing it from unjustifiably restrictive assumptions about the practical institutional forms that representative democracies, market economies, and the social control of economic accumulation can and should assume.
Unger notes that "Politics sets out to execute a program for which no ready-made mode of discourse exists," and that thus it "raids many disciplines" and develops a "language for a vision" as it moves forward.
In discussing the predicament of social theory and offering his corrections to its failings, Unger suggests that the difficulties of social theory can be traced to the difficulty of accounting for the context-breaking nature of human life. Unger contends that it is necessary to disengage social theory from a style of explanation that treats human thought and action as though they are bound by a describable structure or society as though it is governed by a set of lawlike evolution. Unger does not claim that his proposals constitute the only way to end the tyranny of false necessity. Rather, Unger says, he is offering one possible way, and that the project of reforming society is one that we must undertake step-by-step:
Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task merely suggests a route that Politics actually clears and follows. The modest beginning serves as a reminder that we do not need a developed social theory to begin criticizing and correcting liberal, leftist, and modernist ideas. Instead, our attempts to combine, step by step, revised ideals and changed understandings can themselves help build such a theory.
Unger offers several "points of departure" that, he contends, lead to the same point: the point at which we recognize the necessity of creating a social theory that accounts for human context-transcending ability and thus seeks a way to create social structures that enable their own revision. Of these available points of departure, Unger devotes the most attention to the situation of contemporary social thought: namely, the shortcomings of positivist social science (represented by mainstream economics) and the deep-structure social theory (represented by Marxism), each of which fail, in different ways, to account properly for the true nature of formative contexts and thus offer unsatisfactory solutions to the dilemmas of human life and social organization.
Reminding the reader that "[t]his book works toward a social theory that pushes to extremes the idea that everything in society is frozen or fluid politics," Unger explains the philosophical and scientific setting for his antinaturalistic, politicized social theory. He marshals examples from philosophy to support his argument, looking closely at the concepts of necessity and contingency to show that there is no aspect of our knowledge that is immune to empirical revision, and that we can always find "more to be true than we can yet prove, verify, or even make sense of." Unger also points to an embarrassment of historical explanation, namely the constraint that historical particularity imposes upon general explanations. This philosophical discussion supports Unger's argument against social theories that would hold that we are puppets of our circumstances or that our thoughts or actions are ever finally constrained by our contexts.
Volume 3: Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success