Empowering Humanity: Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s False Neccesity

Empowering Humanity
Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s False Necessity
A Critical Analysis

“This book is an effort to understand why contemporary societies are organised as they are, and to imagine how we can reform them to empower humanity – all of humanity.”
(Unger 2004, pp. xvii)

Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s work False Necessity, the first of his three volume series Politics, presents to us a nuanced and compelling vision of how we might address our place within the world as humans, both in our relationship to the non-human and to each other. He writes from a background as a law professor, but draws upon philosophy, social and critical theory, and economics to construct an argument for long lasting radical change in order to address the growing problem of inequality, which he sees as a fundamental root of other issues. He argues for “transformative politics”, “empowered democracy” and a “radicalized pragmatism” in place of what he sees in the current system as an ongoing cycle between alternatives on the left and on the right, subjected to vested interests and political impotence (Unger 2004 pp.1vii-1xviii).  Originally written in 1987, False Necessity can be see as a response to the rapid advance of globalisation at the time, with the 2004 introduction to the new addition expanding upon the original text in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and the events of September 11(Klein 2009, Unger 2004). The alternative he espouses seeks to equip people with the means and ability to create meaningful lives, evoking an almost Nietszchean ideal anchored by his belief in the “genius of ordinary men and women” (Nietzsche 1885, Unger 2004 pp. 1xxii).

In discussing the text it is worth looking to Fernand Braudel’s three-part work Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century as an interesting base to begin addressing some of the ideas in False Necessity. In a similar historical tradition to Edward Gibbon’s exhaustive history study The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Braudel examined the structures and networks that gave rise to the political, economic and technological beginnings that led to the Industrial Revolution (Braudel 1979, Gibbons 1776-89). It is this tracing of myriad networks and interactions that seem to occur with no single purpose, yet continue to produce remarkably similar patterns and events, that is one of the most interesting aspects of Civilization and Capitalism. Globalisation is often talked about as a recent development, yet as Braudel and even Gibbons point out, trade networks have very nearly spanned the globe since the earliest days of human civilisation (Braudel 1979, Gibbons 1776-89, Klein 2009).

Two things seem to stand out in Braudel’s meticulous observations: trade and the influence of geography. They are co-related; trade routes naturally favoured certain locations due to the logistics of transport at the time, which led to powerful city-states becoming the dominant political forces until circumstances change and the status quo shifts, leaving once thriving ports in decline while new centers flourish. Braudel’s longue durée, literally the ‘long term’ view of history helps us to understand these deeper structures within the ways that societies organise themselves (Braudel 1958, Braudel 1979). It is this unfathomable complexity of these structures and the ways they interrelate that is worth keeping in mind. Unger uses this observation to argue why the modern nation state and global systems of governance are in many ways undesirable and inefficient, that instead of viewing them as logical outcomes or the result of natural tendencies we should see them as abstract, meaningless coincidences that have resulted from centuries of inconsequential decisions and events. This is not to say that he is arguing for a Randian neoliberal utopia or a stateless anarchist society, he concedes that there are things like large infrastructure projects and defense that call for a national body to make decisions. It is the inflexibility of the current system to the needs of the individual and their local community that is one of the targets of his polemic (Unger 2004).

“After the collapse of communism, only one political-ideological project seems to remain in the world; the attempt to marry American-style economic flexibility with a residue of European-style social protection.”
(Unger 2004, pp. 1ix)

Unger states that False Necessity has two themes, that of “false necessity” itself and that of “empowered and empowering democracy” (pp. xvii). On the idea of false necessity he takes what he sees as the key insight of what he terms “deep structure social theory”, that is the establishment of a critical understanding of the artificial nature of society. He argues that despite our understanding of this, we remain locked into a relatively narrow range of ways of organising our societies and institutions, and that this is often falsely justified as the result of the “appeal of practical necessity or the balance of opinions and interests” (Unger 2004 pp. 6). He asks why the range of alternatives is so narrow, and why efforts at reform are so often dismissed as fanciful or trivial in societies that value so highly, at least in  principle, the freedom and the value of the individual.

Expanding on this later, he also muses upon the individual’s ability to disrupt these contexts that they find themselves within, with surprising regularity and seemingly with ease (Unger 2004 pp.319). This acknowledges the deep philosophical dilemma of free will, and acknowledges our innate ability to rebel against and critique the seemingly immobile structures of culture and its institutions. It is in this vein that he is most hopeful, expressing a deep belief in the imagination and a person’s capacity to transcend the context of their situation. His argument for “empowered democracy” is the means by which he hopes to give people the means to be greater and more free than they are, yet also more compassionate and connected to the people around them (Unger 2004).

In Chapter 5 Unger lays out the justifications of his proposals for this idea of “empowered democracy”. In empowering the individual, he seeks to move beyond a world where social interactions swing between subjugation to a larger will and an isolating freedom of the self, and instead tool all people with the means to exist fully as a “context-revising agent” (Unger 2004, pp. 364). He sees access to and quality of  education as a key means of empowering the individual and part of a social minimum that equips every person with the means to make more of their lives. The link between education and the engagement of the individual has long been documented, however in an interview with CounterPunch, Unger also points out that it is the quality of the education that must also be paramount, that people be equipped with the analytical understanding necessary to learn from and thrive in new environments, rather than learning by rote and an emphasis on obedience (Brennan 2008, Glaeser et al 2007, Hillygus 2005, Unger 2009, Unger, cited in Keliher 2012).

Another key point that he makes relates to an observation about a central contradiction of capitalist globalisation; that capital is free to move across national borders, yet labour is not. He makes several arguments across the text for why this must change, in that he sees it as an essential part of wider economic reform, and as a way of addressing inequality and people’s access to opportunity – not just merely better infrastructure and services – and that for people to be truly free it must become a universal right to make a home where you choose. This is particularly poignant when weighed into the debate over asylum seekers both in Australia and elsewhere. The tyranny of borders gives people a stark choice between statelessness and violence or death. This is a small but key part of the programmatic argument he outlines in Chapter 3 onwards, that in order for humanity to be free there must be fundamental structural reform at every level and a new experimentalism embraced, within which communities can discover new forms of institutional organisation without becoming trapped by their rigidity (Unger 2004, Unger 2009).

It is at this point that I would like to discuss the text in a context that is not mentioned explicitly by Unger. It would seem that within his argument for a “radicalised pragmatism” and experimentation with rigid structures lies much that can be found within the context of contemporary art practice (Bourriaud 1998, Cuenca 2012, Groys 2010). Art, specifically when it is operating in a mode that is critical of capital, can offer us a unique perspective in that it does not wholly operate either within or without capitalist (or communist) modes of production and is uniquely unlike other commodities (Groys 2010, Gilligan 2013). Artists have also shown remarkable inventiveness in the ways that they organise themselves collectively as well, from the Surrealists to Fluxus to the myriad forms of affiliation and cooperation that A.R.I’s and collectives engage in today, as well as those that engage with a more recognisably commercial art market through established galleries and auctions (Blessi et al 2011, Joy & Sherry 2010, Sholette & Ressler 2013). It is this willingness to embrace experimentalism and opportunity and to engage the wider community with challenging and novel ideas and experiences that I believe offers the potential for a dialogue between an art context and Unger’s explanatory arguments and programmatic themes (Unger 2004).

This is not to say that contemporary art practice contains the seeds of the reform that Unger proposes as it stands now, merely that it has the potential. In the same way that the art world’s embrace of Jean Baudrillard in the 1980s was misguided and repudiated by the author himself (Lotringer 2005, Baudrillard 2005), it is not simply enough to look at the work art currently does and deem it sufficiently disruptive to open genuine dialogue on the future of our societies. Art institutions and markets face serious criticism as elitist, tacitly corrupt edifices that operate as the world’s largest unregulated legal market for the benefit of a very small group of wealthy collectors, artists and curators at the expense of the vast majority. This criticism often goes unaddressed or is dismissed as the complaints of those who have missed out or who have not played by the rules (Lee 2011, Spiegler 2005).

Within art movements such as Nicholas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics that explicitly claim to be radical and anti-capitalist a similar criticism emerges as to who exactly is being engaged by these artworks and in what capacity. Rikrit Tirawanija’s Untitled 1992/1995 (free/still) (1992-2011) takes place within a gallery space. To what end does this include those marginalised by education and financial opportunities? Similarly with Santiago Sierra’s work 160cm Line Tattooed on 4 People (2000), just how much does this work engage people in a robust criticism of the nature of work and “the poorly paid jobs backing the structure of the global market economy” (Manchester 2006) from the webpage of Tate gallery? In order for art to truly engage people and ideas in a way that is radical, dynamic and transformative these criticisms must be addressed head on. A question must be asked of ourselves and each other of not just the meaning of art and why we make it, but for whom.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s False Necessity is an imposingly comprehensive explanation and justification of his argument for a rejection of what he sees as the current patterns of impotence and oppression in political systems around the world. He calls for the institution of a system of radical “deepened” democracy that respects and empowers the individual and enables them the freedom to embrace their humanity. What gives Unger’s argument a particularly compelling gravitas is both the sheer scale of his academic work – since its publication he has continued to expand upon the ideas of False Necessity with another eight books – and that over the last three decades in his native Brazil he has actually worked toward testing and implementing his ideas in practice both as a political advisor and as the Minister for Strategic Affairs from 2007-2009 (Romano 2008).

It is difficult to find concrete dismissals of Unger’s work that he hasn’t already examined and worked through in the text. In that respect he paid extraordinary attention to detail. There is a heavy streak of romanticism in his ideas, but he keeps this grounded in concrete analysis and critique. By his own admission, his work is extremely speculative, however he counters this with his argument that he is not advocating the total revolution and a chance to seize power offered by the Marxists, but a process of piecemeal, fundamental reform towards the freedom and sustenance of the individual. It is as much an appeal to the imagination and an attempt to address the human spirit as it is a programmatic guide for institutional reform. It is the constant belief, that within us we have the ability to reform our selves and our world for the better, that make False Necessity so compelling.

 

 

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Artworks

  • Tirawanija, R 1992-2011, Untitled 1992/1995(free/still), MoMA,
  • Sierra, S 2000, 160cm Line Tattooed on 4 People, Tate Gallery,