| Review of: | False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy by Roberto Mangabeira Unger |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Shahrar Ali |
| Reviewed in: | The Political Quarterly |
| Date accepted online: | 27/07/2004 |
| Published in print: | Volume 75, Issue 1, Pages 83-96 |
Book Reviews: The Complexity of 'Political Islamism'
I approached Roberto Unger's second edition of
This new volume is even longer than the original because Unger has added a new introduction of over 100 pages. Could not an author who expects his reader to digest nearly 800 pages be himself expected to explain to whom he addresses the work and what its importance may be? Unger does neither of these things. He takes his reader for granted, without addressing the reader's reasonable expectations. It is ironic that Unger is himself concerned to criticise the assumptions that he takes us to be making about institutional structures.
Unger misses an opportunity to address his reader when admitting in the introduction: 'When this book was first published, nothing happened! Many authors have the experience of seeing a book fall on deaf ears.' Unger offers as a reason for deficiency in the first edition a mismatch between 'message and its form', but, remarkably, does not identify length as one aspect of form.
Unger's prose suffers from a lack of clarity that conciseness could have helped him to correct. Does one not expect of the introduction, for example, a tidy enumeration of the contents of the main text? Instead, the two appear to jostle with one another for Unger's attention. The outcome is not a happy one. Unger begins by adumbrating the book's 'two themes', to wit, false necessity and deep democracy. A few pages later, Unger advances a further theme: 'who we are, and how we can and should remake ourselves'. A few lines later, as a 'fourth task', Unger undertakes to show us how 'our basic human predicament' can be seen in 'a changed and clearer light'. Unfortunately, it is not clear how this fourth task may be distinguished from the third theme, other than by enumerative fiat.
Unger over-uses conjunctions. Two adjacent pages contain all of the following: 'challenge and change', 'contests and compromises', 'ideals and interests', 'institutional and ideological', and 'reimagine and remake'. The impression created in this reviewer is of an author who engages in alliteration to the detriment of precision.
Let us turn our attention, then, to his ideas. Unger claims that we find ourselves 'entrenched' in our institutions in a way that is formative of our characters and social behaviour. Unger's key proviso is that our current circumstance is not a necessary feature of our 'denaturalized' human condition (our condition beyond the state of nature).
The institutions that make up our prevailing context are said to be 'up for grabs' in a way that Unger thinks we have failed to realise, mistaking them instead to be fixed. Unger's contribution consists of diagnosing our fixation with prevailing institutions as symptomatic of our adherence to a suspect 'explanatory framework'. He claims that we falsely adopt a framework of necessary connection that is in truth only contingent.
If this is a fair summary, my complaint is that politicians, social scientists and political philosophers alike do not universally accept that institutional change is not achievable. Resignation on the part of one or more of these groups about the impenetrability of our institutions on a given occasion is not the same as their having conceded the inconceivability of change in their generation or the next. Ferocity of debate between social welfarists and economic individualists, in politics and academia alone, undermines Unger's submission that 'necessitarian' assumptions generally have been made or are being made. To the contrary, the kind of institutional set-up and ideals conditioned by those institutions are clearly
Unger renders explicit his philosophical commitments in a section on 'functional and counterfactual explanation in the theory of context making'. One of his better explications, this is one of the few places in the book where Unger contrasts his view with those of other scholars (notably G. A. Cohen and Jon Elster).
Focusing here on the first species of explanation named in the title of this section, Unger's claim is that functional explanation best describes his anti-necessitarian view of the possible transformation of our institutions. Functional explanation, according to Unger, treats 'the power of something to generate certain effects as the cause of that thing'. This may sound peculiar at first, but the idea clearly has resonance in our everyday talk. Arguably, we can account for an individual's piece of behaviour in terms of a character trait that is also a manifestation of that behaviour. Suppose that you win the election
However, functional explanation is not as resourceful as Unger's endorsement of it implies; not without further argument. Unger presupposes that the kind of explanatory reasoning I have said we use in our ordinary talk can establish itself as properly causal. But if, say, we were to ask for a complete explanation of the election win, often enough we would find ourselves resorting to the beliefs and desires of the election candidate. In short, a commonsense psychological explanation would allow us to attribute a resultant motive as the true behavioural cause. Without contesting this rival explanatory principle, Unger's advocacy of functionalism remains unconvincing.
Unger explores the connection between our characters and their formative context throughout the book. In particular, his call for institutional 'context smashing' against the prevailing system of economic rights is of potential interest to readers of this journal. These rights, by Unger's admission, guarantee personal security through 'unrestricted claims to divisible portions of social capital'. In Unger's vision, people would establish new forms of personal security independent of economic values. They would do so 'by finding senses and varieties of security compatible with an ever greater jumbling up of distinct styles of life'.
Unger's vision is not so distant a reality as he supposes. In the UK, paymasters have been subjected to increasing criticism regarding the perceived lack of correspondence between the payoff to their executives and those executives' work performance. Unrestricted entitlement to economic gain is now being subjected to legislative review by the Labour government. The Green Party, too, in its philosophical principles, has long recognised the need for new economic ideas and institutions to help to define welfare more broadly than monetary wealth.
The deeper relevance of Unger's work to the current geopolitical context is disrupted by a double contingency. First, the force of many of the generalisations made by Unger about communism in 1987 are diminished by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. No recognition of the fall is made by the current edition, which suggests to this reviewer that the main text represents a perfect copy of the previous edition (a suspicion verified to my own satisfaction by comparison of pagination between the two). The second contingency is that the introduction is dated June 2001, prior to the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers of New York. Unger's assumptions about the perceived invulnerability of our institutions could not have been more short-lived; for better and for worse, respectively.
Unger's thesis need not have stood or fallen by the current applicability or otherwise of empirical reflections once made by him that now seem dated. But when Unger assumes that we falsely take prevailing institutional ideals to precondition us, episodes in 1989 and 2001 force us to revisit the thesis that we ever believed thus, thereby weakening Unger's antithesis.
A model second edition would have conceded the need for some revision. Perhaps I should say instead of 'revision', following Unger,