Roberto Unger is widely recognized as one of the most innovative and intellectually audacious political and legal theorists alive today. Placing himself in the tradition of “revolutionary reforms,” Unger has charted a course between social democracy and neoliberalism, seeking to combine the best element of both nonstatist and liberal aspirations.

In this new work, Unger brings to bear his unique understanding of the replaceable nature of social and political institutions on the present gobal situation. The world economy is being reorganized as a network of economic vanguards, of privileged insiders, separated from the economic rearguard, the largely disenfranchised outsiders. Traditional devices for containing this division, whether through a redistributive welfare state or the support of small business, have proved inadequate.

Democracy Realized challenges the ideological dominance of neoliberalism, which insists that all countries must converge in their acceptance of the dictates of market “flexibility.” Instead, Unger has developed practical alternatives that can narrow the divide between insiders and outsiders. In particular, he argues that in rich and poor countries alike, a more decentralized and inclusive relationship can be built between business and government, and that levels of civic engagement and group organization can be heightened and strengthened.

In an age when leftist and progressive circles are marked by timidity and defensivenss, Unger's Democracy Realized restores intellectual courage and programmatic zeal to political thought.

“[Unger] does not make moves in any game we know how to play... [His] book may someday make possible a new national romance ... [I]t will help the literate citizens of some country to see vistas where before they saw only dangers … see a hitherto undreamt-of national future.” — Richard Rorty

“A brilliant contribution to social thought.” — New York Times Book Review on Politics

“Roberto Mangabeira Unger's project is breathtaking . . . He is writing what may be the most powerful social theory of the second half of the century.” — Critique and Construction on Politics

Roberto Mangabeira Unger is Professor of Law at Harvard University. His other books include The Critical Legal Studies Movement, and from Verso, What Should Legal Analysis Become?, and the three volumes of Politics: False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy; Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task; and Plasticity into Power.