Politics: The Central Texts

by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Book Overview

This selection of key texts from Roberto Mangabeira Unger's three-volume Politics presents an explanatory theory of society and a program for social reconstruction as a radical alternative to Marxism... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1859841317
• ISBN13: 9781859841310
• Release Date: April 1997
• Publisher: Verso
• Length: 482 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

the future is an open project

Robeto Unger's 'Politics', written earlier than Francis Fukuyama's much hyped 'The End of History and The Last Man',as also, earlier than the final collapse of the of the Soviet Union in 1991, is at once a statement of the alternatives to Soviet communism and a proto-critque of postmodern pessimism epitomized by Fukuyama.In the books comprising 'Politics', Unger offers a convincing critique of the claims to scientism of both Marxism and positivism, by showing the patched up character of history. He shows that to types of constraints, both modifiable in different degrees operate in history, viz., the institutional and imaginative frameworks of society. The latter are more flexible than the former. However, even in the face of constraints of the former kind, the range of historical options is not as limited as is generally assumed. Unger shows that by regarding the society as an artifact and through a marriage of liberalism and Marxism, both of which have more in common than was previously thought, one can open up hitherto unexplored historcal possibilities of radical transformative practice.