Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative
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| Author | Roberto Mangabeira Unger |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Political theory |
| Publisher | 1998 (Verso) |
| Pages | 309 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 61460569 |
| LC Class | JC423.U49 1998 |
| Preceded by | What Should Legal Analysis Become? |
| Followed by | The Future of American Progressivism: An Initiative for Political and Economic Reform |
Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative is a 1998 book by philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. In the book, Unger sets forth a program of "democratic experimentalism" that challenges and defies the neoliberal consensus that there are few alternatives for the progressive reform of democratic and market structures.
In Democracy Realized, Unger describes the change in the locus of worldwide ideological conflict since the collapse of communism from the old conflict between statism and privatism, to the new ideological conflict about alternative forms of economic, social, and political organization. Unger notes the persistent difficulty in formulating credible alternatives to the neoliberal program in this setting. In the book, he presents a program for overcoming these difficulties through a practice he describes as “democratic experimentalism.”
At the heart of Unger’s productivist program is his explanation of the difference, in business firms, between vanguard production and rearguard production. He contends that the practices of vanguardist production, which include continuous education, a softened contrast between task-defining and task-executing activities, a culture of cooperation between vanguardist firms, and a practice of permanent experiment, already exist in relatively isolated segments of the economy that have greater links to each other, across national borders, than they do to the rearguard economies of their own countries. The vanguardist practices modeled by these firms and industries, Unger argues, are key to productive progress in the contemporary world, and should be extended beyond the productive vanguard to all areas of society, with the assistance of a government reconfigured along democratic experimentalist lines. Unger sets forth the changes he envisions in government, including mechanisms to break impasse between components of government, provisions to heighten political mobilization, expanded and democratized access to capital, a higher social savings rate, significant resources devoted to social endowment, and a central role to an emancipatory school that would train children, as little prophets, to become an informed, creative, and mobilized citizenry of the empowered democracy that Unger envisions.
Unger concludes the book with a manifesto consisting of thirteen theses that sum up the principles of democratic experimentalism.
Anthony Barnett, reviewing Democracy Realized in the Times Literary Supplement, praised the book highly:
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