28 quotes
Just as the attempt to actualize liberal ideals requires ideas and arrangements unfamiliar to liberals, so the effort to make our moral experience resemble more closely what so much of moral thought already supposes it to be like calls for a practice of role defiance and role jumbling that has little place in traditional moral doctrines.
False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987)
[T]he quest for a social world that can better do justice to a being whose most remarkable quality is precisely the power to overcome and revise, with time, every social or mental structure in which he moves.
The Critical Legal Studies Movementː Another Time, A Greater Task (2015)
The ultimate stakes in politics are the qualities of the direct relations among people.... This fine texture of routinized human relations is the primary social reality. Even the boldest transformative efforts often take it for granted or, having acknowledged its importance, fail to alter it.
False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987)
By marrying experiment to speculation, we put ourselves in a dimmer version of the circumstance of the Creator. We remake nature or we imagine it remade. By this expedient we free ourselves, if only partly and tentatively, from suspicion of our beliefs, and we live once again, unafraid, in the light of the actual.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
The more successfully we learn and practice the gospel of plasticity, the less suitable we become as subjects of the necessitarian styles of social and historical analysis that the great social theorists have taught us. We can, in fact, raise a storm in the world and still understand and explain ourselves. All we need is a better approach.
Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success (1987)
[T]he indispensable instrument of a visionary politics is collective mobilization, which brings people together in ways not foreordained by the established structure or the prevailing dogmas of society.
Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success (1987)
The driving force in the world economy is fast becoming a global confederation of productive vanguards. The vanguards established in different parts of the world drive one another forward. They trade with one another. They transfer personnel, technology, and organizational practices among themselves. Above all, they emulate one another.
Democracy Realizedː The Progressive Alternative (1998)
For all the classic social theorists, the effort to state a comprehensive view of men and society was inseparable from an interest in understanding the condition and prospects of their age. In this they simply repeated the eternal lesson that all deep thought begins and ends in the attempt to grasp whatever touches one most immediately.
Law in Modern Societyː Toward a Criticism of Social Theory (1976)