Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (born March 24, 1947) is a philosopher, social theorist, and Brazilian politician. His writings develop a vision of human nature and offer structural alternatives to contemporary social, political, and economic institutions. He has authored over two dozen books, the themes of which pursue a radical alternative to Marxism, and about which American philosopher Richard Rorty said have a "better chance than most to be linked, in the history books, with some such world-transforming event." Unger has been engaged politically in Brazil and around the world in formulating movements to realize national and global alternatives.

Unger was educated at the Harvard Law School and has taught at Harvard for all of his adult life. He became the youngest tenured faculty at the law school in 1976, and has since instructed many of the world elite, including Barack Obama, who took "Jurisprudence" and "Reinventing Democracy" with Unger. He offers classes only in the spring semester on subjects covering everything from the history of religious thought to programmatic solutions to the present day economic crisis.

At the root of Unger’s thought is the conviction that the world is made and imagined. His work begins from the premise that no natural social, political, or economic arrangements underlie individual or social behavior. Property rights, liberal democracy, wage labor—for Unger, these are all historical artifacts that have no necessary relation to the goals of free and prosperous human activity. His books have sought to explicate the ideals of human social, political, and economic activity, and to free them from their institutional chains. Doing so, he holds, will enable the realization of the full extent of human potential and, as he puts it, “make us more god-like.” For Unger, the market, the state, and human social organization should not be set in predetermined institutional arrangements, but need to be left open to experimentation and revision according to what works for the project of the empowerment of humanity. Much of Unger's work is an attempt to rethink society and politics for the liberation of humanity from the constraints of social hierarchy and the degradation of economic enslavement.

Unger has long been active in Brazilian oppositional politics, where he has attempted to realize institutional alternatives. He was one of the founding members of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party and drafted its manifesto. He directed the presidential campaigns of Leonel Brizola and Ciro Gomes, ran for the Chamber of Deputies, and twice launched exploratory bids for the Brazilian presidency. He served as the Minister of Strategic Affairs in the second Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration. He is currently working on social and developmental projects in the Brazilian state of Rondônia.