In the depths of the Sixties, Charles de Gaulle, perhaps apocryphally, was quoted as stating that “Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be”. This backhanded compliment from the then French president was supposed to illustrate the divergent political and economic trajectories of the New World. In effect, the USA was the future, while the vast resource-rich Latin American states to Washington’s south, especially Brazil, held an unfilled promise.
No figure embodies this symbiosis better than Roberto Mangabeira Unger, the American-Brazilian philosopher, politician and Harvard Law School professor. Now 76, Unger’s star has risen, fallen and risen again in importance as both a global and specifically “New World” thinker. Today, he is more influential than ever: if De Gaulle once located Brazil’s promise in a constantly deferred future, Unger, in contrast, is a philosopher who argues the moment for innovation is now.
Often described as “Brazil’s answer to John Stuart Mill”, Unger shares both Mill’s youthful precocity (reading Plato’s Republic as a bedtime story) and a record of serving in government. At the heart of his work, however, there is a rejection of Mill and much of the Anglophone world’s liberal faith in progress.
Indeed, through a 49-year career spanning politics, law, social and political theory and philosophy, Unger has put forward a collection of searching inquiries meant to pierce the liberal mythos of necessary progress. Across dozens of books, including the recently published metaphysical tome The World and Us (2024), the Brazilian philosopher has tried to think beyond 20th-century categories through a series of questions.
To what extent can our politics be understood as an ongoing experiment rather than a set of negotiated solutions? How far are human beings free to transform themselves? What can be rescued from the lost thought of marginalised social groups, such as the peasants, petite-bourgeoisie shopkeepers and artisans crushed between the development of big capital and the working class? Can we think beyond the boundaries of capitalism and socialism, liberalism and bureaucracy, anarchy and the state? How can the nation retain political meaning and reinvent itself in a globalising world?
These lofty questions have played out across Unger’s life. Generationally, Unger is part of, and partly characterised by, the distinctly positivist Baby Boomer generation. This was a cohort that experienced a great opening up of cultural and economic possibility while contesting social norms, Left and Right-wing dictatorships and, ultimately, the Cold War itself before declaring the End of History. Admittedly, Unger’s thought tends to mistake the contingent positivity of his generation, expressed half-heartedly in the third-way Clinton, Blair and Obama administrations, for a natural phenomenon, despite his ongoing critique of necessity.
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SubscribeInteresting but strange article. I’m an American (lawyer) now living in Brazil through the Bolsonaro and now (current) Lula administrations- my wife is a Brazilian lawyer and neither of us has ever heard of Roberto Unger (not that that is definitive of anything, but I bet most readers never heard of him).
Based on the article, Unger sounds like a Lula socialist (Lula, you’ll recall, is famously a communist, former union boss who in the 90’s set up with Fidel Castro a loose confederation of commies in Latin America – he was also put in jail for profiting from his office as president, but was released by a single, close-friend Supreme Court Judge on a jurisdictional technicality- AFTER the statute of limitations had run).
So Unger seems to want to dismantle or lessen the political power of the elites in government and business and the very powerful Brazilian Unions, in favor of the “dispossessed” – bankrupt or poor but somehow between the working class and the elites?
In any event, the desire to “redistribute” political power is always suspect, especially in Brazil – the land of propinas and corruption – which somehow hangs together enough to rival France in GDP.