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Quotes from False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy — Roberto Mangabeira Unger

born 1947 Brazil

← All quotes by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

5 quotes

The radicals want something of the quality of the hot moments of social life—the periods of accelerated collective mobilization—to pass into the cold moments—the ordinary experience of institutionalized social existence.

False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987)

[T]he project of the modernist visionary: the search for individual and collective empowerment through the dissolution of the prewritten social script.

False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987)

There is no permanent canon of forms of normative argument. Our ways of arguing about ideals are, like our other practices, the mutable products of a specific history and the expressions of our ideas about society and thought.

False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987)

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)

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)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Roberto Mangabeira Unger (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.