 | |
| Author | Roberto Mangabeira Unger |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Philosophy |
| Publisher | 1975 (Free Press) |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 341 |
| ISBN | 978-0029328705 |
| OCLC | 400847 |
| 320.5/1 | |
| LC Class | HM276.U53 1975 |
| Followed by | Law In Modern Society: Toward a Criticism of Social Theory |
Knowledge and Politics is a 1975 book by philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. In it, Unger criticizes classical liberal doctrine, which originated with European social theorists in the mid-17th century and continues to exercise a tight grip over contemporary thought, as an untenable system of ideas, resulting in contradictions in solving the problems that liberal doctrine itself identifies as fundamental to human experience. Liberal doctrine, according to Unger, is an ideological prison-house that condemns people living under its spell to lives of resignation and disintegration. In its place, Unger proposes an alternative to liberal doctrine that he calls the "theory of organic groups," elements of which he finds emergent in partial form in the welfare-corporate state and the socialist state. The theory of organic groups, Unger contends, offers a way to overcome the divisions in human experience that make liberalism fatally flawed. The theory of organic groups shows how to revise society so that all people can live in a way that is more hospitable to the flourishing of human nature as it is developing in history, particularly in allowing people to integrate their private and social natures, achieving a wholeness in life that has previously been limited to the experience of a small elite of geniuses and visionaries.