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Social Theory POLITICS: A WORK IN CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIAL THEORY by Roberto Mangabeira Unger SOCIAL THEORY: ITS SITUATION AND ITS TASK FALSE NECESSITY: ANTI-NECESSITARIAN SOCIAL THEORY IN THE SERVICE OF RADICAL DEMOCRACY PLASTICITY INTO POWER: COMPARATIVE­ HISTORICAL STUDIES ON THE INSTITUTIONAL CONDITIONS OF ECONOMIC AND MILITARY SUCCESS SOCIAL THEORY: ITS SITUATION AND ITS TASK A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION TO POLITICS A WORK IN CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIAL THEORY ROBERTO MANGABEIRA UNGER n, ro1h1 o/r� U1ti"rn1y of C<1mb,,dit 10 pr,M and stll ,,11 ""'""" of books '"'" 1ran1rd by H,nry nu,,. 1514 n.,, Un,w,rsi1y ltas p,,M,d a1tdpublish,d rontm..,,.,,/y '11ta/JU CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE NEW YORK PORT CHESTER MELBOURNE SYDNEY Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 !Rl' 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011, USA lO Stamford Road, Oaklcigh, Melbourne 3 166, Australia © Roberto Mangabeira Unger 1987 First published 1987 Reprinted 1988, 1990 Printed in the United States of America Library of C1111grc.1s Catalo,i;!illg-i11-Publiwtion Data Unger, Roberto Mangabcira. Social theory: its situation and its task. "A critical introduction to Politics, a work in constructive social theory." I. Sociology 2. Political science. 3. Philo;,ophy. I. Unger, Roberto Mangabcira. Politics, a work in constructive social theory. II. Title. HM24.u536 1987 301 1.0l 86--7882 British Library Catafogi11g in Pr1bliwtimi Data Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. Social theory its situation and its task : critical introduction to Politics, a work in constructive social theory. 1. Political sociology. I. Title 320'.01 JA76 1�BN 0-521-32974-4 hardback ISBN 0-521-33862-x paperback Contents 1 Introduction: Society as Artifact page 2 The Conditional and the Unconditional 18 3 The Idea of the Transformative Vocation: A First Point of Departure 26 4 Credible Ideals and Transformative Insight: A Second Point of Departure 36 5 The Constraints on Transformative Action: A Third Point of Departure 48 Fa6ng False Necessity 48 The Disappointments of Transformative Practice 48 A Limiting Case of Social Closure 49 The Instruments of Closure: The Oligarchy Effect 49 The Instruments of Closure: The Identity Effect 50 The Instruments of Closure: The Survival Effect 51 Emancipation from False Necessity 52 The Sources of Emancipation: Mass Politics 52 The Sources of Emancipation: World History 56 The Sources of Emancipation: Enlarged Economic Rationality 59 The Quality of Partial Emancipation 60 The Puzzles of Partial Emancipation from False Necessity 61 Unexplained Routine 61 Interrupted Dissociation 63 Experiences of Blockage and Opportunity 64 The Exemplary Instability of the Third World 64 A Brazilian Example 67 6 The Circumstance of Social Theory: A Fourth Point of Departure 80 Society as Made and Imagined 80 V VI Contents The Broader Intellectual Context: The Rejection of Self-Evident and Unconditional Knowledge 80 The Failure to Rescue the Ideal of Unconditional Knowledge 82 From the Rejection of the Ideal of Unconditional Knowledge to the Abandonment of the Naturalistic View of Society 84 Deep-Structure Social Theory 87 The Distinction Between Routines and Frameworks 88 Particular Frameworks as Instances of General Types 90 General Types as Subjects of Lawlike Explanations 91 The Limits of Deep-Structure Analysis 92 Deep-Structure Analysis and Functional Explanation 93 Marxism as an Evolutionary Deep-Structure Social Theory 96 The Two-Sided Relation of Marxism to Deep-Structure Analysis 96 Marxist Theory and Leftist Parties 98 The Core Problem of Indeterminacy 99 The Troubles of the Concept of Capitalism IOI The Sources of Difficulty 109 Playing up Politics: The Failure to Rescue the Theory from Within II3 The Practical Significance of Theoretical Error II 7 Economics as a Nonevolutionary Deep-Structure Social Theory 120 A First Statement of the Problem I 29 Positivist Social Science and Naive Historiography 130 The Avoidance of Context I30 Techniques of Avoidance 133 A Second Statement of the Problem: History Without a Script I 3 5 Trouble with the Script: The Shared Embarrassments of Deep-Structure Social Theory and Positivist Social Science I 3 5 The Modest Eclectic Response 139 Objections to the Modest Eclectic Response 141 Beyond Modest Eclecticism 143 The Reinterpretation of Constraint 144 Making Sense of the Slogan "It's All Politics": Toward a Radically Antinaturalistic Social Theory I 5 I Themes of a Theory I 5 1 Practical Implications I 59 Contents v 11 Two Ways to Develop the Idea that Everything Is Politics: Super-Theory and Ultra-Theory 165 170 Turning7 The Philosophicalthe Scientistic Prejudiceand Scientific Upside Setting Down of an 170 Antinaturalistic Social Theory Necessity and Contingency 172 The Thesis Stated 172 The Limiting Case of Extreme Necessitarianism 174 The Empirical Revision of Conceptions of Necessity: A Cosmological Example 177 The Thesis Generalized 1 80 Historical Particularity and General Explanations 1 8 5 The Problem Introduced 18 5 Historical Particularity as a Challenge to General Explanation: Examples from Natural History 187 The Explanatory Advantages of Weakened Constraint 192 200 8 Conclusion: The Radical Project and the Criticism Bibliographicalof False Necessity Notes 216 Proper-Name Index 241 Thematic Index 243 1 Introduction Society as Artifact ODERN social thought was born proclaiming that society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact rather than the expressionM of an underlying natural order. This insight inspired the great secular doctrines of emancipation: liberalism, socialism, and communism. In one way or another, all these doctrines held out the promise of building a society in which we may be individually and collectively empowered to disengage our practical and passionate relations from rigid roles and hierarchies. If society is indeed ours to reinvent, we can carry forwardthe liberal and leftist aim of cleansing from our forms of practical collaboration or passionate attachment the taint of dependence and domination. We can advance the mod­ ernist goal of freeing subjective experience more fully from a pre­ written and imposed script. We may even be able to draw the left­ liberal and modernist goals together in a larger ambition to construct social worlds whose stability does not depend on the surrender of our society-making powers or on their confiscation by privileged elites. The practical point of the view of society as made and imagined is to discover what is realistic and what illusory in these objectives and to find guidance for their execution. No one has ever taken the idea of society as artifact to the hilt. On the contrary, the social theories that provided radical politics with its chief intellectual tools balanced the notion that society is made and imagined against the ambition to develop a science of history, rich in lawlike explanations. This science claimed to identify a small number of possible types of social organization, coexisting or succeeding one another under the influence of relentless devel­ opmental tendencies or of deep-seated economic, organizational, or psychological constraints. Marxism is the star example. Such theories have become ever less credible. A mass of historical knowledge and practical experience has battered them. Inconvenient facts have discredited their characteristic beliefs in a short list of types of social organization and in laws that determine the identity of these types or govern their history. But the most visible result of this battering has not been to extend the idea of society as artifact. On the contrary, it has been to abandon more and more of the field to a style of social science that seeks 2 Social Theory narrowly framed explanations for narrowly described phenomena. This social science - positivist or empiricist as it is sometimes called - rejects the search for comprehensive social or historical laws in favor of a more limited explanatory task. In so doing, it comes to see society as a vast, amorphous heap of conflicting individual or group interests and exercises in interest accommodation, of practical problems and episodes of problem solving. Such a social science lacks the means with which to address the institutional and imaginative assumptions on which routine problem solving and interest accom­ modation take place. Whatever the adepts of this social science may say, their practice has a built-in propensity to take the existing frame­ work of social life for granted and thereby to lend it a semblance of necessity and authority. In this respect, positivist social science is even more dangerous than the ambitious social theories of the nine­ teenth and early twentieth centuries. These theories at least defined the present institutional and imaginative order of society as a tran­ sitory though necessary stage of social evolution or as only one of several possible types of social organization. Meanwhile the radical project - the shared enterprise of liberal and leftist doctrines and of the political movements that embraced them - has also suffered a daunting series of setbacks. The communist revolutions, despite their economic and redistributive achievements, failed to establish social institutions that could credibly claim to carry the radical project beyond the point to which it has already been brought by the rich Western democracies and market economies. At the same time, party politics in these democracies has settled down to a series ofroutine struggles over marginal economic redistribution,
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