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“A philosophical mind out of the Third World turning the tables, to become a synoptist and seer of the First.” … Perry Anderson
What should the left propose is a manifesto that engages a vital question of our time: given that the major ideological proposals of the past two hundred years fail to address today’s problems, where do we go from here?
Confronting the major debates in the world today…about national alternatives and alternative globalizations…Unger shows that there is a set of national and global alternatives that we can begin to develop with the materials at hand: opportunities available to us only if we learn to recognize them. These alternatives would, over time, vastly enhance our practical capabilities. They would also give greater reality to the central teaching of democracy: faith in the constructive genius of ordinary men and women.
For Unger, a programmatic argument is not a blueprint; it marks a direction and explores next steps.
Praise for Politics
“Politics soars into the rarefied stratosphere of social theory, striving to realize the highest aspirations of modernity itself. Mr. Unger is thus best understood in relation to contemporaries who reach for similar heights, such as European thinkers Hans Blumenberg, Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault.” — New York Times
“[Unger] does not make moves in any game we know how to play …[His] book may someday make possible a new national romance … [It] 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
Roberto Mangabeira Unger is one of the leading social and political thinkers in the world today. His previous books include The Critical Legal Studies Movement, False Necessity: Antinecessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, What Should Legal Analysis Become?, and Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative (Verso). Verso has recently published a new edition of his classic trilogy, Politics.
Cloth: 2005
180 pages
Cloth
1 84467 048 1
US$23 / £15 / CAN$32
