Roberto Unger
Roberto Unger
Roberto Mangabeira Ungeris a philosopher, professor, and politician. His work offers a vision of humanity and a program for society aimed at empowering individuals and changing institutions. He has developed his views and positions across many fields, including social, political, and economic theory. In legal theory, he is best known by his work in the 1970s/80s while at Harvard Law School as part of the Critical Legal Studies movement, which helped disrupt the methodological consensus in American law schools. His...
NationalityBrazilian
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth24 March 1947
CountryBrazil
At every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different
One of the striking features of the form of globalisation that has now been established is that it is based on the premise that goods and even capital should be free to roam but labour must remain imprisoned within the nation state.
Social solidarity must rest (instead) on the sole secure basis it can have: direct responsibility of people for one another. Such responsibility can be realized through the principle that every able-bodied adult holds a position within a caring economy - the part of the economy in which people care for one another - as well as within the production system
In a world of democracies, the most deserving basis of national differences is that the different states of the world should represent a form of moral specialisation within humanity.
The scientist should treasure the riddles he can't solve, not explain them away at the outset.
In my view, a political vision is not a grab-bag of discrete problems and solutions. It is the visionary anticipation of a direction.
The essential thing, the ultimate goal of politics and thought, is a bigger life for the individual. A bigger life – that remains the main objective…to increase our divine attributes to have moral life.
Insofar we are death-bound, existence is urgent and frightful. Insofar as are groundless, it is vertiginous and dreamlike. Insofar as we are insatiable, it is unquiet and tormented.
In a world of democracies, in a world where the great projects that have set humanity on fire are the projects of the emancipation of individuals from entrenched social division and hierarchy; in such a world individuals must never be puppets or prisoners of the societies or cultures into which they have been born.
When we imagine our Universe to be just one out of a multitude of possible worlds we devalue this world, the one we see, the one we should be trying to explain.
I regard myself as a man without charm in a country of charmers.