What Should the Left Propose? - Hardcover

Unger, Roberto Mangabeira

3.5

14 ratings by Goodreads

9781844670482: What Should the Left Propose?

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1844670481 ISBN 13: 9781844670482

Publisher: Verso, 2006

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What Should the Left Propose? is a manifesto that engages a vital issue of our time: the program for which Leftists should stand, now that the ideological proposals of the past two hundred years are exhausted.

Confronting the major debates in the world today — about national alternatives and alternative globalizations — Unger shows that there is a set of national and global alternatives that we can begin to develop with the materials at hand: opportunities available to us only if we learn to recognize them. These alternatives would, over time, vastly enhance our practical capabilities. They would also give greater reality to the central teaching of democracy: faith in the constructive genius of ordinary men and women.

For Unger, a programmatic argument is not a blueprint; it marks a direction and explores next steps. He explores the form this direction could take in the European social democracies, in the United States, in the developing countries, and in the contest over the reform of globalization. He shows how the Left in power can do more than use compensatory redistribution to sugarcoat economic inequality, and how it can make good on its ideals without reaffirming a discredited commitment to governmental control of the economy.

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About the Author:

Roberto Mangabeira Unger is one of the leading social and political thinkers in the world today. He is also active in Brazilian politics. Verso has published much of his work: False Necessity: Antinecessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, What Should Legal Analysis Become?, Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative, Politics, and The Left Alternative.

From Publishers Weekly:

A moribund Left gets zapped with a cattle prod in this stimulating visionary manifesto. Brazilian social theorist Unger (Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative) paints leftists as hidebound and backward-looking, clinging to a vestigial social democracy that ameliorates the ills of a market economy instead of trying to transform it. Rather than resist economic and social change, he argues, the Left should drive "the permanent creation of the new" by championing New Economy managerial techniques of cooperative innovation, promoting state support for small entrepreneurship and venture capital formation and exploring "experimental" forms of markets, property and contract. Properly guided by "high-energy" politics, he insists, such initiatives can enhance equality, security, social solidarity and returns to labor, broaden opportunity, usher in "the divinization of humanity" and bestow on the individual "a more god-like self." Some readers will no doubt find his sweeping indictment of social democracy unfair, his co-optation of avant-garde management theory naive, and his celebration of change and upheaval utopian. Many of his proposals, like privatizating social services or making everyone hold a second job in the "caring economy" tending to the old, the young, the sick, the poor or the desperate (no, family members don't count), are ill thought-out. Still, he offers an incisive critique of social and economic discontents, one that turns traditional Marxist formulations on their heads ("we... are, in large numbers, petty-bourgeois now.") The result is a provocative challenge to left orthodoxies that should spur plenty of controversy-and fresh thinking.
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