The Left Alternative
 |
|
| Author | Roberto Mangabeira Unger |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Political theory |
| Publisher | 2009 (Verso) |
| Pages | 197 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 1314098 |
| LC Class | JA83 .U64 2009 |
| Preceded by | Free Trade Reimagined |
| Followed by | The Religion of the Future |
The Left Alternative is a 2009 book by philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. In the book, Unger identifies problems with contemporary leftism and proposes a way to achieve the goals that he believes should be central to the progressive cause: inclusive economic growth through the heating up of politics and democratizing the market economy, a relentless process of institutional innovation that depends less upon crisis for change, and depends more on shortening the distance between context-preserving and context-transforming moves. The Left Alternative was first published in 2006 as What Should the Left Propose?
In The Left Alternative, Unger describes the situation of the world today as a "dictatorship of no alternatives": a condition in which in the world seems to offer few alternatives for lifting the majority of people out of lives of poverty, drudgery, and belittlement. Progressives content themselves with "humanizing the inevitable," merely softening the effects of existing institutions. Unger contends that there are fragments of alternatives being developed across the world, but these do not appeal to the West and often amount to "local heresies" that would not survive a sustained challenge. What Unger proposes is a "universalizing heresy"—a set of ideas that are rooted in an attempt to achieve economic growth with social inclusion, and comprehensive and general enough to apply across the world. Such an alternative, envisioned by this universalizing heresy, would describe a narrow gateway through which all societies must pass on the way to creating actual difference.
Unger contends that the contemporary left is disoriented, bereft of any plausible or compelling alternatives to the neoliberal consensus that has gained in authority and influence in the rich western countries, and missing as well the ideas to support such an alternative, agents to advance the alternative, or a crisis that would be an impetus for adopting the alternative. But there is an alternative, Unger argues, one that would show how to combine both social inclusion and individual empowerment in political, economic and social institutions. This alternative would reshape production and politics, would refuse to see familiar forms of market economy, representative democracy and free civil society as necessary or canonical, would reject the contrast between market-oriented and command-economy solutions as a focus of ideological contests, would focus more on equality and inclusion within a setting of economic growth and technological innovation, than on increasing equality by redistribution through tax-and-transfer. The solution would democratize and radicalize the market economy by innovating in its arrangements and rethinking its logic. The overall aim of social policy would be to enhance individual capabilities through education and social inheritance, advance democratization of the market economy, and establish institutions of high-energy politics. The guiding philosophy of Unger's proposal, he explains, is "not the humanization of society; it is the divinization of humanity." Unger sees this alternative as applicable across a broad range of richer and poorer societies, thus making possible a "universalizing heresy" that can oppose the universalizing orthodoxy promulgated by the rich Western countries on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
...
Wikipedia