Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Lee Smolin

Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin argue for a revolution in our cosmological ideas. Ideal for non-scientists, physicists and cosmologists.

The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time

"A book about religion and a religious work in its own right, it proposes the content of a religion that can survive faith in a transcendent God and in life after death. According to this religion - the religion of the future - human beings can be more human by becoming more godlike, not just later, in another life or another time, but right now, on Earth and in their own lives."--Publishers website

The Religion of the Future

Volume 1 of Politics, a work in constructive social theory. Newly available, the complete work of Politicsa program for a comprehensive progressive alternative to the dominant ideologies of social democracy and neo-liberalismfrom one of the worlds leading social and political thinkers. False necessity is the central theme in the three-volume series Politics. It presents both a way of explaining society and a program for changing it. The explanation develops a radical alternative to Marxism, showing how we can account for established social arrangements without denying their contingency or our freedom. The program offers a progressive alternative to the now-dominant ideological conceptions of neoliberalism and social democracy: a set of institutional innovations that would democratize markets, deepen democracy and empower individuals. For this new edition, Unger has written a comprehensive introduction that explores the limits of our understanding of society and our practice of politics, and reconsiders proposals contained in the book as special cases of a larger family of untried political possibilities.

Anti-necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy : from Politics, a Work in Constructive Social Theory

False Necessity

Plasticity Into Power (Politics, Volume 3)

يقظة الذات 

In what kind of world and for what kind of thought is time real, history open, and novelty possible? In what kind of world and for what kind of thought does it make sense for a human being to look for trouble rather than to stay out of trouble?In this long-awaited work of general philosophy, Roberto Mangabeira Unger proposes a radical reorientation of established ideas about nature, mind, society, politics, and religion. He shows how we have to change our beliefs if we are to succeed in doing justice to our most distinctive contemporary experiences, discoveries, and ideals. The Self Awakened mobilizes the resources of several philosophical traditions, and develops the unrecognized revolutionary implications of the most influential of these traditions today--pragmatism. Avoiding technical jargon and needless complication, this book makes a case for philosophy as the supreme activity of the intellect at war, insisting on its power to deal with what matters most.

Pragmatism Unbound

The Self Awakened

Revolutionary account of the transformative potential of the knowledge economy Adam Smith and Karl Marx recognized that the best way to understand the economy is to study the most advanced practice of production. Today that practice is no longer conventional manufacturing: it is the radically innovative vanguard known as the knowledge economy. In every part of the production system it remains a fringe excluding the vast majority of workers and businesses. This book explores the hidden nature of the knowledge economy and its possible futures. The confinement of the knowledge economy to these insular vanguards has become a driver of economic stagnation and inequality throughout the world. Traditional mass production has stopped working as a shortcut to economic growth. But the alternative--a deepened and socially inclusive form of the knowledge economy--continues to lie beyond reach in even the richest countries. The shape of contemporary politics on both the left and the right reflects a failure to come to terms with this dilemma and to overcome it. Unger explains the knowledge economy in the truncated and confined form that it has today and proposes the way to a knowledge economy for the many: changes not just in economic institutions but also in education, culture, and politics. Just as Smith and Marx did in their time, he uses an understanding of the most advanced practice of production to rethink both economics and the economy as a whole.

The Knowledge Economy

In what kind of world and for what kind of thought is time real, history open, and novelty possible? In what kind of world and for what kind of thought does it make sense for a human being to look for trouble rather than to stay out of trouble? In this long-awaited work of general philosophy, Roberto Mangabeira Unger proposes a radical reorientation of established ideas about nature, mind, society, politics, and religion. He shows how we have to change our beliefs if we are to succeed in doing justice to our most distinctive contemporary experiences, discoveries, and ideals. The Self Awakened mobilizes the resources of several philosophical traditions, and develops the unrecognized revolutionary implications of the most influential of these traditions today--pragmatism. Avoiding technical jargon and needless complication, this book makes a case for philosophy as the supreme activity of the intellect at war, insisting on its power to deal with what matters most.

He then shows how we can rebuild our political, economic, and social institutions, making them more faithful to the experimental nature of democracy. The consequence is to redefine the focus for ideological debate and institutional innovation throughout the world, in developed and developing countries alike.

The Central Texts

Politics

This essay explores the contradictory coexistence between two approaches to law that have been dominant in all major legal traditions: law as the normative order chosen by the legitimate and effective holders of power in the state and law as a normative order implicit in social life -- a series of detailed models of what relations among people can and should look like in different parts of social experience. The rudimentary form of the first approach is legal thought as the interpretation of law laid down by the sovereign. The simplest form of the second approach is legal thought as authoritative doctrine developed by jurists and judges in the absence of legislation or as its most important source. The central problems of legal theory result from the impossibility of reconciling these two views of law. The solution to those problems is not theoretical; it is practical: the changes in the organization of society, the economy, and the state that would make democratic self-government a reality -- rather than the sham that it continues to be -- and transform the character of both legislation and legal doctrine. Such a practical solution, however, requires, to guide it, a revolution in our thinking about the institutional and ideological regimes, expressed as law, that shape social life. The foremost task of legal thought today, and the answer to the enigmas of its universal history, is to contribute to the development of that way of thinking.

The Universal History of Legal Thought

Revolutionary account of the transformative potential of the knowledge economy Adam Smith and Karl Marx recognized that the best way to understand the economy is to study the most advanced practice of production. Today that practice is no longer conventional manufacturing: it is the radically innovative vanguard known as the knowledge economy. In every part of the production system it remains a fringe excluding the vast majority of workers and businesses. This book explores the hidden nature of the knowledge economy and its possible futures. The confinement of the knowledge economy to these insular vanguards has become a driver of economic stagnation and inequality throughout the world. Traditional mass production has stopped working as a shortcut to economic growth. But the alternative—a deepened and socially inclusive form of the knowledge economy—continues to lie beyond reach in even the richest countries. The shape of contemporary politics on both the left and the right reflects a failure to come to terms with this dilemma and to overcome it. Unger explains the knowledge economy in the truncated and confined form that it has today and proposes the way to a knowledge economy for the many: changes not just in economic institutions but also in education, culture, and politics. Just as Smith and Marx did in their time, he uses an understanding of the most advanced practice of production to rethink both economics and the economy as a whole.

This new edition of False Necessity marks the beginning of Verso's reissuing of Roberto Mangabeira Unger's major works in political and social thought, first published together as Politics. Unger's ideas have helped to inspire progressives across the world who look for alternatives to the ruling political and economic orthodoxy. Here he develops a radical explanation for society that is different from both Marxism and neoliberalism, and offers a program for change. His new and comprehensive introduction explores the limits to our understanding of society and politics and reconsiders the proposals in the book as examples of many untried intellectual and political possibilities.

Critical legal studies is the most important development in progressive thinking about law of the past half century. It has inspired the practice of legal analysis as institutional imagination, exploring, with the materials of the law, alternatives for society. The Critical Legal Studies Movement was written as the manifesto of the movement by its central figure. This new edition includes a revised version of the original text, preceded by an extended essay in which its author discusses what is happening now and what should happen next in legal thought.

Another Time, A Greater Task

The Critical Legal Studies Movement

"Law in Modern Society" is a comparative study of the place of law in societies as well as a criticism of social theory. Under what conditions do different kinds of law emerge? What are the bases of the rule of law ideal that marks advanced liberal, capitalist societies? What can the study of law teach us about social hierarchy and moral vision in these societies, and, indeed, about the specificity of Western civilization? Why do we find it necessary to struggle for the rule of law and impossible to achieve it? What political possibilities are closed or opened by present-day changes in the established styles of legality and legal thought? Unger deals with these questions in a broad range of historical settings. But he also relates them to the central issues of social theory: the method of explanation, the conditions of social order, and the nature of 'modern' society. the book argues that to resolve its own internal dilemmas the science of society must once again become both metaphysical and political.

Law in Modern Society

Examines the modern view of human nature and analyzes the desire to be accepted by other people.

An Essay on Personality

Passion

Roberto Mangabeira Unger is widely regarded as one of the leading living social theorists. In Democracy Realized, he gives detailed content to his conception of a progressive and practical alternative to neoliberalism in contemporary politics. His efforts to inspire this have drawn increasing attention throughout the world as well as in his native Brazil where they are currently informing a network of politicians and business leaders called The Latin American Alternative. But the United States and Europe, argues Unger, are equally in need of a fresh alternative to the status quo.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

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