Word: ungerer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...UNGER, in a rather desultory manner, calls Marxism the best previous refutation of liberalism, but rejects it as a useful theory. He criticizes its historical determinism, its concern with the distribution of wealth and the emphasis on the means of production. He says it fails to resolve the antimony of theory and fact and "does not penetrate the realm of the consciousness." And yet he adopts one of Marx's more humanistic concepts, that of the species-being...
...comes closest to "universal harmony" in two forms of human activity, work and love. Unger's views about the value of work seem adapted from Marx, but he avoids the concept of alienation and sees no need for the worker to be a jack-of-all-trades. Unger accepts the continued division of labor, though he says it is moderated and refined to prevent the worker from feeling apart from the larger product...
...tones as strong as those of the Communist Manifesto, Unger implores...
...Unger here is at the precipice of his analysis. Liberal thought and its revisions are in ruins below him--he looks out toward a new kind of society. But he has caught himself in his own trap: because the general can never accurately describe a particular, he can construct no clear vision of what should come about. The rudiments of his new theory, as formulated, is open to pretty much the same attacks he levels at Marxism. In attempting "total" criticism, Unger launched an attack not merely upon liberalism, but upon the concept of theory itself. And it is probably...
...START on this project, Unger devotes the last chapter of Knowledge and Politics to a "theory of organic groups." He sketches a society of small, democratically-run communes. They are close-knit enough so that everyone knows the other members and has a form of "political love" for them, relating to them not in their work roles but as individuals. The inhabitants have lost all sense of pure self-interest and think only of the interests of the commune...