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.
Overview
Introduction
Unger opens Knowledge and Politics by explaining how he intends to criticize liberal doctrine and how that criticism will help lead to, and elucidate, a positive program: the creation of a nonliberal doctrine of mind and society. He explains that the rationale for this theoretical enterprise is rooted in the human desire to understand the “meaning of life,” specifically, the nature of the bond between the self and the world. Unger contends that the contemporary human moral experience is one of division, between a side of the self that maintains allegiance to the dominant theoretical and political regimes of society, and another side that is drawn to ideals that current modes of thought reject. Under this experience of division, Unger contends, human experience demands “total criticism” of the kind he intends to apply to the doctrine of liberalism.
Unger describes classical liberal doctrine as both a ruling consciousness of society and a metaphysical system, a system of ideas which involves a particular organization of moral sentiments. In human moral experience, liberalism's failure to satisfy the ideal of the self (which Unger later describes as the fullest expression of man's species nature) is experienced as the twin evils of resignation and disintegration. The early liberal thinkers and the classic social theorists understood the radical separations that mark human life, between self and nature, self and others, self and its own roles and works. By undertaking a total criticism of liberal doctrine, particularly by repudiating its distinction between reason and desire, and Unger intends to lay the groundwork for his positive program, the nonliberal social theory that would help to overcome these divisions and give full expression to a range of human feelings and ideas.
Chapter 1: Liberal Psychology
The Antinomy of Theory and Fact
The liberal doctrines of mind and society rejected the medieval view of knowledge which held that all things in nature have intelligible essences. Under the doctrine of intelligible essences, everything can be classified under the word that names its category. Liberal thinkers, in rejecting the doctrine of intelligible essences, realized that there is an infinite number of ways objects and events can be classified, infinite ways the world can be divided up by the mind. Liberalism's rejection of the doctrine of intelligible essences had far-reaching consequences for moral and political views. The rejection of intelligible essences also led to the antinomy of theory and fact, a seemingly insoluble conflict between two ideas that seemed equally plausible but led to equally absurd consequences. The antinomy of theory and fact is the conflict between, on the one hand, the realization that all understanding of facts is mediated by theory, and on the other hand, the belief in an independent comparison of theory and fact. Faced with the antinomy of theory and fact, we ask: how can we assess the power of competing theories, if there is no appeal to facts independently of theories? Kant's metaphysics offered a promising and ingenious solution—namely, locating the source of the antinomy in the division of universal and particular, form and substance, in human thought. The division between the universal and particular is at the heart of the contradictions of liberal thought.