Word: ungerer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...task was too great for anyone to master in his first work. Unger here is the great synthethizer rather than theoretical innovator. He stands on the shoulders of earlier giants, borrowing but rearranging their ideas to uncover the contradictions in liberal theory...
...Unger promises at the outset to utilize, unlike Marx and Weber, a form of "total" rather than "partial" criticism that will "serve as the key that will allow us to escape from the prison house" of paradoxical liberalism, "whose rooms did not connect and whose passageways led nowhere...
...SOME OF his sharpest analysis, Unger shows that the internal contradictions within liberalism lead to a breakdown of law and justice. If the Supreme Court is torn over conflicting interpretations of the Constitution, it is not because the document is poorly constructed, but because general theorems cannot be applied perfectly to specific cases...
...develop into a fully corporate state, in which individuals would be forced to act only within their bureaucratically defined roles, eliminating the interaction of human beings as human beings. Unger finds another possible course of development, the emergence of a socialist regime, equally undesirable. Here the holding of power and the definition of ends would become arbitrary. Even if private property were abolished, the desire for power would not be, and the socialist bureaucracy would provide an effective means of enforcing greater control...
Leftists who read Knowledge and Politics will first criticize Unger for giving such cursory treatment to Marx, though they will probably applaud his critique of liberalism. But because of Unger's logical structure, they cannot accept too much of what he says. The arguments he uses against liberalism can be turned against Marxism with almost equal force...