The World and Us

(Hardback)

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In The World and Us, Roberto Mangabeira Unger sets out to reinvent philosophy. His central theme is our transcendence - everything in our existence points beyond itself - and its relation to our finitude: everything that surrounds us, and we ourselves, are flawed and ephemeral. He asks how we can live so that we die only once, instead of dying many small deaths; how we can breathe new life and new meaning into the revolutionary movement that has aroused humanity for the last three centuries, but that is now weakened and disoriented; and how we can make sense of ourselves without claiming for human beings a miraculous exception to the general regime of nature. For Unger, philosophy must be the mind on fire, insisting on our prerogative to speak to what matters most. From this perspective, he redefines each of the traditional parts of philosophy, from ontology and epistemology to ethics and politics. He turns moral philosophy into an exploration of the contest between the two most powerful contemporary moral visions: an ethic of self-fashioning and non-conformity, and an ethic of human connection and responsibility. And he turns political philosophy into a program of deep freedom, showing how to democratize the market economy, energize democratic politics, and give the individual worker and citizen the means to flourish amid permanent innovation.

Reviews

A restless visionary striving to realize the highest aspirations of modernity itself -- William Connolly * New York Times *
One of the few living philosophers whose thinking has the range of the great philosophers of the past. * Times Higher Education *
Unger stakes out new discursive space that is neither simply left nor liberal, Marxist nor Lockean, anarchist nor Kantian . . . an emancipatory experimentalism toward ever-increasing democracy and individual freedom -- Cornel West
Here something new has occurred: a philosophical mind out of the Third World turning the tables, to become synoptist and seer of the First. -- Perry Anderson
What makes Unger different is his orientation toward the future rather than the past-his hopefulness. -- Richard Rorty
Unger insists on the need to refocus on what really matters, the human spirit. -- John Paul Rathbone * Financial Times *
Brazil's answer to John Stuart Mill. A political philosopher extraordinaire. * Chronicle of Higher Education *

Author Bio

Roberto Mangabeira Unger is one of the leading philosophers and social thinkers in the world today. He is active in Brazilian public life and has served twice as Brazil's Minister of Strategic Affairs, charged with developing initiatives that signal a direction for his country. A polymath, he has written widely in legal, political, economic, and moral theory as well as in natural philosophy. Among his major writings are Passion: An Essay on Personality, a modernist view of human nature; False Necessity, a radical alternative to Marxist social theory; and, most recently, The Knowledge Economy, a study of the unrealized potential of the new vanguard of production. The World and Us is the capstone of his lifework.