Harvard Law’s Roberto Unger takes on the future of Brazil
Think of Roberto Mangabeira Unger as Brazil’s answer to John Stuart Mill — a century and a half later and considerably nattier — with a pronounced Nietzschean bent that drives him to certain acts of excess.
Take the attitude of this political philosopher extraordinaire, the Harvard law professor widely regarded as leader of the critical-legal-studies movement that roiled American legal academe in the 1980s, toward books. He’s loved them as long as he can remember.
During his teen years in Rio de Janeiro, recalls Unger, gazing out the enormous windows of the ministry he now leads in this country’s modernist capital, he ordered so many foreign tomes that Brazilian authorities grew suspicious.
“I got a telegram from the Customs,” explains the wiry 61-year-old minister of strategic affairs, “saying that the frequency and the quantity with which I received books indicated that I was a nonregistered merchant and the books were therefore impounded.”
Unger — or “Mangabeira,” as all Brazilians call him — laughs in a rapid-fire giggle, as if revealing the ambitious bad boy behind the player who now sits in a green-tinted Oscar Niemeyer building, in sleek power suit and silk tie, greeting the American ambassador to Brazil one day, convening the leaders of top Brazilian legal organizations another, finally getting his hands on the wheel of the country whose politics he’s sought to influence so many times before.
Unger is not the first philosopher to snare, so to speak, a state office of his own, or a fancy car and driver. Plato advised Dionysius the Younger of Syracuse. Hume served as an undersecretary of state. Leibniz did a stint as an imperial privy councilor in Vienna. Nobody says philosophers can’t get their hands dirty in politics.
But there’s something especially beguiling about the present circumstances of the often reclusive Professor Unger — prolific author, thinker, and star professor with a longtime mystique in legal and political academe — a rara avis who speaks in ornate sentences laced with $10 words, whose idea of a good time is organizing the conceptual framework of world society in multiple volumes.
Watch him brainstorm in his American-accented Portuguese with Brazilian labor leaders while driving his brilliant young staff (which includes a couple of former Harvard master’s students) through 14-hour days. Listen to him scold an Al-Jazeera interviewer who’s squawking false facts (he insists) about Amazonian deforestation into his earpiece. Watch him steal moments to look at the copy he’s carrying around of Carlos Masmela’s Hegel: La Desgraciada reconciliación del espíritu.
How could a true avatar of Mill end up in a vast, wood-paneled, largely empty office on the eighth floor of a ministry with nary a bookshelf to be seen? In an office so bereft of personal effects that Unger could grab his brown leather satchel and clear out in 10 minutes? Why would he opt to be so far from wife Tamara Lothian (who teaches law at Columbia) and his four children in the United States, in a mostly unfurnished apartment in the Niemeyer-mandated housing blocks that make up this hyperplanned city’s “residential sectors”?
There’s a long story here — it includes the grandfather who served as governor of Bahia, the great-uncle who founded the Brazilian Socialist Party. It encompasses the canny way he got himself appointed by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known to all as “Lula” — the first Brazilian president to rise from factory worker to the top, a charismatic dynamo who has as much in common with Unger as George Bush might have had with John Rawls as his secretary of state.
It’s a story that makes it all seem almost inevitable — the kind of “inevitable” that Roberto Unger, who writes endlessly against historical “necessity” and “determinism,” might feel a tad awkward about.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger came into the world in Rio de Janeiro on March 24, 1947, but only because his American lawyer-father, Artur Unger, suffered a massive heart attack during a family visit from the United States. It turned a planned short stay into a serendipitous asset for his son’s future political ambitions.
After recovering, Unger’s Dresden-born father, who had arrived in the United States as a child and become a naturalized citizen, returned to New York City with Unger’s mother, Edyla Mangabeira, a Brazilian poet and feminist journalist — and their new addition. Unger spent his childhood on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and attended the private Allen-Stevenson School.
Unger’s mother and father met during his maternal grandfather’s eventual exile in the United States. Octávio Mangabeira was a great liberal politician from the state of Bahia, a former professor of astronomy whose star rose after his 1910 public lecture on Halley’s comet mesmerized the locals. His grandfather, explains Unger, served as Brazil’s minister of foreign affairs in the late 1920s before the dictatorship of Getulio Vargas forced him out of the country.
“He was a very great influence on me,” says Unger, making clear over a week of conversations that he remains the greatest political influence. “My parents would send me to Brazil, often alone, to stay with my grandfather during my school summers.” Unger accompanied Mangabeira, a senator then, to work every day.
“He was revered in Brazil, especially in Bahia,” Unger continues, “as an incarnation of the Republic. He would walk in the streets, people would kiss his hand, no one would accept money from him. … For me, it was a remarkable, potent image. … A person could be good and even saintly and nevertheless completely engaged in the world.”
Summers with Octavio turned a solitary child (“I had no friends my own age”), one who spoke English at home and only simple Portuguese, into a would-be Brazilian. “I wanted to have my life in Brazil,” recalls Unger, and he fought bitterly about the issue with his father until the latter’s death in 1959.
Then 11-year-old Roberto Unger got his wish. His mother took him and his sister, Nancy, a year and a half younger, back to Rio, where he attended the best Jesuit school and finally “learned to speak properly and write properly” in Portuguese.
If Unger’s grandfather transformed him into an embryonic politician, his mother provided his “awakening to philosophy.” When he was 7, Unger remembers, “my mother read to me Benjamin Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Republic, and that aroused my imagination very powerfully.” He began to seek out works by and about philosophers.
Brazil, however, turned out to be “immensely hierarchical,” with “terrible” schools open “only a few hours in the morning.” That permitted Unger to continue the autodidact agenda that marked him as a precocious student by the time he moved from high school to five years of law school in Rio.
Unger planned to study abroad after law school, then combine part-time academic life, lawyering, and politics. He felt comfortable mixing academic and political ambitions because, he says, in Brazil “career paths are much less separate at the elite level.” Sympathetic to some goals of student leftists who challenged the military government that had taken power in 1964, Unger was “repelled” by their “frame of mind,” their streety ethos. While they celebrated Che, the proto-scholar, in his spare time, studied classical Greek.
Unger also began to develop his characteristic bent in political theory: a synoptic desire to connect all areas of life and thought, to articulate large forms of systematic intellectual architecture by reflecting on friction among concepts in specific contexts. From early on, he says, the “idea that greater universality and greater depth is achieved by struggling through the more particular” seemed to him “the most promising path of thought.”
Although he wouldn’t graduate from his Rio law school until December 1969, Unger persuaded the Harvard Law faculty to “anticipate” the successful completion of his exams and admit him as an LL.M. (or master’s) candidate in September. Arriving at age 22 too late for the LL.M. orientation, Unger lucked out — Harvard had arranged for the tardy arrivals to get special mentoring. That would aid his own rise to appointment at the school.
“A member of the law faculty would come once a week and describe the general ideas of his subject to us,” Unger recalls. It gave him an opportunity “to debate with a large percentage of the members of the Harvard Law faculty in succeeding weeks.” He got to know the law faculty “very early.”
Unger had already, in Brazil, written the substance of what would be his thesis on the comparison of legal doctrine, theology, and grammar. He presented it to Charles Fried, his adviser, who “said it was fine, and that was that.” He thus finished his official LL.M. work in his first few days, permitting him to devote the year to taking and auditing courses.
By the summer of 1970, the Brazilian military dictatorship began to crack down on opponents. Brazilian police seriously wounded Unger’s sister — then involved in the revolutionary underground — as they arrested her. “I was unable to return,” Unger explains. Harvard Law invited him to stay on for a second year in a fellowship capacity and teach. Suddenly, at 23, without having gone through a regular American law program, Unger taught first-year contracts to 140 students, many his own age.
Soon appointed as an assistant professor — one of the youngest ever at Harvard Law — Unger invented courses more his style, such as “Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel” for law students. “It was understood that I was like a visitor from Persia,” observes Unger of his exotic approach. He began simultaneously to write Knowledge and Politics and his second book, Law in Modern Society: “I would work until very late at night, and sleep on the rug, and be woken in the morning by the cleaning people.”
At one point, Unger confides, Al Sachs, then Harvard Law’s dean, asked if he would change “Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel” to “Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, and the Law.” Recalls Unger, “I said no because of the code of honor that kept me from saying yes to a figure in authority. … And he just laughed and shrugged his shoulders, and that was that. Basically no Harvard Law School dean since then has ever asked me for anything.”
Tenure, at age 29, came in 1976. Roberto Mangabeira Unger, world-class philosopher, was on his way.
As a thinker, Unger established, beginning with Knowledge and Politics (Free Press, 1975), an ambitious and occasionally forbidding abstract philosophical style closer to his German heritage than his Brazilian one (Unger scoffs at such etiological explanations). Scholarly reactions to Unger’s work have ranged from over-the-top praise to dismissive contempt.
The high point of Unger’s profile came in the late 80s, after he published his mammoth three-volume Politics, a Work in Constructive Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Northwestern University Law Review organized a full-issue symposium on him containing lengthy assessments by such important scholars as Drucilla Cornell, William A. Galston, Cass Sunstein, and Cornel West. Stanley Fish checked in with an article on “Unger and Milton” in the Duke Law Journal. Richard Rorty devoted a major essay to “Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future.” Over the decade, The New York Times devoted substantial reviews to Unger’s Passion: An Essay on Personality (Free Press, 1984), The Critical Legal Studies Movement (Harvard University Press, 1986), and Politics.
West, an admirer of Unger’s “fascinating” books despite some reservations, praised his project as “the most significant attempt to articulate a Third-Wave Left romanticism that builds on the best of the Jefferson-Emerson-Dewey and Rousseau-Marx-Gramsci legacies.” Jerome Neu celebrated Unger in his Times review of Passion for “some of the most brilliant writing of this kind since Hegel.” Fish tipped his hat to Unger’s “distinctive” voice. Rorty wrote admiringly, “He does not make moves in any game we know how to play.”
In contrast, Stephen Holmes blasted Unger’s 1,140-page Politics in a New Republic review headlined, “The Professor of Smashing: The Preposterous Political Romanticism of Roberto Unger.” In that treatise, Unger argued repeatedly for a “radical project” of “context-smashing” that would usher in a “complete remaking of society.” Holmes groaned that “a more repetitive attack on repetitiveness is difficult to imagine.” Holmes savaged Unger for a “riot of inconsistency” and “overdose of rhetoric,” as well as out-of-control Nietzscheanism in his demand that we “cleanse social life of its taint of enslavement.” Galston zapped Unger for a failure to realize that “aggressive contempt for social democracy does not promote the fulfillment of radical aspirations.” Sunstein conceded Politics’s “impressively learned” character but found it a “seemingly self-contradictory work” that “ultimately points in the wrong direction.”
Unger’s own view of his work remained, and remains, confident. He acknowledges that despite the fuss over Politics, he’s still best known in the United States for his role in critical legal studies. In sparking that school of thought, which challenged the objectivity and neutrality of legal doctrine as taught in elite law schools (thus attracting many young law students and academics), he shook things up with the help of Harvard Law faculty contemporaries Duncan Kennedy and Morton J. Horwitz. They deliberately invented “CLS,” Unger asserts, on the theory that claiming that it existed “would help create the thing itself.”
Once CLS took off, Unger found himself sharply disagreeing with its “neo-Marxist” direction and the belief that “texts can be made to mean whatever you want them to mean. Both ideas seemed to me dead ends.” Opposing the naturalist idea that particular legal institutions are “necessary,” Unger preferred to emphasize the “institutional imagination” he thought legal analysis should display. He thinks that view has been “vindicated” because CLS’s “most significant legacy” is to treat legal thought “as an inquiry into the possibilities of reconstruction” — a tool for devising better institutions.
Mark Tushnet, a law professor at Harvard and constitutional-law expert long associated with the CLS movement, agrees that CLS has left its mark and that many legal scholars “continue to do work that’s identifiably in the tradition.” Tushnet credits CLS with influencing “critical race theory and critical feminist theory” in American law and reviving “strong versions of American legal realism after its impact had faded.”
Law, in any case, struck Unger as just one “terrain” for institutional imagination, and his CLS work as “a subordinate part of my general intellectual project.” Primarily, he says, he cared about “the imagination of alternatives in the world.” Always a “connoisseur of systematic scholastic constructions,” he says he was never “really attracted to the content of Marxism.” For him, “the categories of Das Kapital were very similar in their tone and method to the doctrinal discussions about the nature of the trinity.”
So his terrain grew larger in books such as Politics. There he sought the “radicalization of classical social theory.” In his view, many intellectuals who turned on Marxism cut it in half and threw away “the good part,” the “transformative aspirations” to change society’s institutions, while keeping the bad part, the determinism implying that history develops in a preordained way. He sought to save the “central insight” that society is “made and imagined.”
That connected to a second key theme of Unger’s thought, its romantic existentialism. Unger intensely believes in the “progressive transformation” of individual human lives. He prefers classical liberals to “late” ones because the former aren’t “fixated on material equality” so much as enhancing “the largeness of the individual.” Unger sees focus on redistributive schemes as “a kind of consolation prize” for not thinking big about human possibility.
As a result, Unger rejects social theories that take merely piecemeal approaches to problems instead of connecting them to big-picture re-evaluations of society’s core structures. That critique lies behind his most recent philosophical book, The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (Harvard, 2007), which he says “gives the best access” to his up-to-the-minute thinking. (Yale University’s Bruce Ackerman has called it “an important contribution to an important conversation” by “one of the very few creative political philosophers of our time.”) In it, Unger draws on American pragmatism while complaining that it’s too conservative, urging a “radicalized” pragmatism that breaks through to systematic imagination, and fresh ideas such as his bold claim there that laws of nature are not eternal but evolve over time. In his current spare moments in Brasília, he’s writing, with the physicist Lee Smolin (The Trouble With Physics), a book on the subject.
Tushnet observes that Unger’s “recent work is read more outside of law than within it,” yet when Unger returns to law — as he did in What Should Legal Analysis Become (Verso, 1996) — people pay attention, and his earlier work “remains influential.” He absolutely agrees with Unger on one point: “His work on legal theory was always subsumed within a larger theory.”
In the category of political appointments, Unger may rate the “political miracle” award. Three years ago, he criticized the first term of Lula’s administration as the “most corrupt in our national history.” Now he meets regularly with Lula. Is he a miracle worker himself?
His political involvement in Brazil dates to the late 1970s, when military dictatorship gave way to a “political opening.” Unger offered his services to the united opposition party. In 1978 he became that party’s chief of staff, took a leave from Harvard, and spent his first stint in Brasília, six months of intense work on a new party that would unite progressive liberals and the independent left. In those days, he says with a grin, he consoled himself “during solitary evenings … with readings and translations of Chinese imperial poetry, one of the themes of which is the presence of the exiled intellectual in the dusty steppes.”
After returning to Harvard, Unger became a weekly columnist for Folha de S. Paulo, Brazil’s leading paper, writing largely policy-oriented pieces. True to his Hegelian desire to see larger truths emerge from smaller dialectical struggles, he says his ideas for Brazil, “far from being a mechanical application of my general theories, were often developed out of my Brazilian experience.”
And there’s no question that Unger’s concrete political ideas over the years have been distinctive and visionary. At various times in his writings, he’s urged a government department of destabilization to shake up “every aspect” of social life, a push toward universal freedom of movement for the world’s people, “immunity rights” that protect people against undemocratic coercion, and a rotating capital fund from which society’s stakeholders can draw, linked to government power to break up excessive accumulation of wealth.
One clear idea he’s confronted in the previous generation’s vision of Brazil’s future is what he calls “tropical Sweden.” It holds that Brazil should adapt the institutional model of the North Atlantic countries and “humanize it through compensatory redistribution.” So, Unger complains, “the humanization of the inevitable” became the “leitmotif” of Brazilian politics.
In contrast, his effort over 30 years, he says, has rested on the principle that “it is not enough to humanize the inevitable, it is necessary to reconstruct the existent.” In his alternative to tropical Sweden, every institution in Brazil faces reconsideration. He seeks an approach to public policy that “would be radical in its outcome, but nevertheless experimental and gradualist in its method.”
Meanwhile, over these past three decades of brainstorming, Unger says he saw himself less as a would-be Brazilian official than a thinker hunting for “political agents capable of acceding to the presidency and, in the course of this struggle for central power, changing things in the direction I desired.”
His main ally for many years was Leonel Brizola, a two-time governor of Rio de Janeiro. Unger had long thought that the Brazilian government, historically attentive to “the organized minorities of the rich Brazil, the Southeast of Brazil,” should pay more attention to “the rest of Brazil, the unorganized majority.” Brizola seemed an ideal partner. Unger helped Brizola run for president twice, but Brizola lost. Later, Unger also advised another presidential candidate, Ciro Gomes, but he lost too.
“In retrospect,” Unger comments drily, “I committed the classic mistake of the philosopher in politics, which is to try and find someone else to do the work. My belief was that once the right agent had been identified, I could get back to my books.” Ever since childhood, he admits, he has been “attracted to the monastery or to the battlefield, to withdrawal and to struggle, and repelled by what lies in between — the normal course of life.” To Unger, “the supreme good is life, vitality.” His romantic streak drives him to resist the rigidification of life into routine — “mummification.” Returning to Brazil, he admits, has been a struggle against his own.
Unger came to the conclusion that he had made a “moral mistake” by wanting to “engage, but not to engage completely,” which “given the nature of the activity and the task, is not possible.”
So, frustrated by the “absence of structural ambition” in Lula’s first term (which had begun in 2002), Unger — who had earlier floated a candidacy for mayor of São Paulo — thought about becoming a candidate for president in 2006. Then Brizola, his chief supporter, died. It became clear he could not win a party’s nomination. A last pre-2006 attempt to provide an “alternative” to Lula’s re-election, the founding of a Brazilian Republican Party, also failed.
Yet Unger’s concrete electoral activity clearly forced Lula to take the professor more seriously. Lula, he says, argued strongly at a meeting Unger attended that he wanted aggressive change in a second term. When Lula faced a runoff after the first round of Brazil’s 2006 election, Unger says, Lula’s “people asked me to make a statement on the television supporting his re-election, and I did so. He was elected.”
Here the story begins to sound like politics as usual. Soon after, Lula’s “people,” Unger explains, “began to work for my appointment.” Asked if it was a straight quid pro quo, Unger responds, “No, of course not.” In April 2007, Lula invited Unger for two long conversations in Brasília, then offered him a new position running a “Secretariat for Long-Term Actions.” Unger accepted, informing Lula that he’d start after finishing his Harvard semester.
That began a struggle over Unger’s post. Opponents of Unger tried to undo the invitation. Newspaper stories suggested Lula didn’t really want his former critic to take the position. Unger suspected a campaign to provoke him into dropping out.
But Unger didn’t, and Lula stuck by him, enabling him to take office on June 17, 2007. When the Brazilian Senate refused to approve the provisional measure creating Unger’s new outfit, Lula, says Unger, “heroically” recreated it by decree. The name of Unger’s new fiefdom became the Ministry of Strategic Affairs. Ironically, legislation remains pending to establish the position long-term.
“A byproduct of these comings and goings,” Unger remarks, “is that to this day, there is enormous confusion about my title. I’m rarely called by the same thing twice.”
So, as a Brazilian Ed Koch might ask, how’s he doing? Does Unger’s unusual combination of systematic philosophical bent, investment in Brazilian details, and global outlook work?
“He is one of the unique ministers in that he does know the United States so well,” says the American ambassador, Clifford M. Sobel, coming out of a meeting with Unger. “Mangabeira Unger is very focused on building partnerships between Brazil and the United States. In fact, we were just talking about a trip for some of his staff to go to Washington, not yet announced, to be followed by the minister himself making his own trip to Washington soon thereafter.”
Unger is ideally situated to test his visions. Brazil, as he remarks, has always had a tradition of “blueprints for the reorganization of the world,” and while he rejects any such thinking that targets precise empirical outcomes rather than a “direction,” it can’t hurt to have a whiff of sober utopianism in the air. In addition, he’s operating in Brasília, the instant capital created in the middle of nowhere in 1960 by President Juscelino Kubitschek, one of the modern world’s most spectacular urban projects.
The press, initially hostile, has become intrigued, even as Unger admits his formal style does not always go over in Brazil. “I don’t have this Brazilian manner of networking with people,” he says. “I’m not part of their world.” While some opposition to him is ideological — “I’m a leftist,” he says, “and, of course, the conservatives in the country oppose me” — much of it, he thinks, would better be labeled “temperamental.” Even his kids phone him from the United States and tell him he ought to talk more like Lula, conversationally rather than, he says, “hieratically.”
Unger’s young Brazilian chief of staff, Daniel Barcelos Vargas, a Harvard LL.M. student who studied with Unger, considers his former professor “the best I had” and consequently joined him in his Brasília adventure. Unger’s secretary, Monica Duarte, marvels at how “he never prepares any notes for his meetings,” but speaks extemporaneously and rivets his listeners.
While some people initially sneered at Unger’s supposed lack of real power — he presides over a “tiny” ministry of only 40-plus staffers dedicated to his new programs — there was no mistaking the celebratory attitude in his office on May 8. At a ceremony at Lula’s Palácio do Planalto, the president designated Unger as chief minister among Brazil’s more than 20 to coordinate the government’s future Amazon policy. “It was a great day for me,” Unger agrees. Six days later, Brazil’s minister of the environment, feeling slighted, resigned.
Asked for an analysis of his effectiveness so far, Unger says everything has gone far better than expected. He recently signed a collaborative agreement with Russia. He’s pushing Brazil’s business and labor communities to do better by the country’s many “excluded” workers. He travels regularly to the Amazon as the government’s top strategist.
“I have the only position in the government that is about everything, except for the position of the president,” Unger exults. “He has all power, and I have none. But I have one advantage over him. I don’t have to manage daily crises. I’m therefore free — as he is not — to deal with the future and to deal with our direction. It’s been fantastic.”
On the last night of a visitor’s week in Brasília, Unger appears at the door of his government apartment and sheepishly warns, “There’s not much to see.”
Indeed, the living room, like Unger’s office, is an expanse of open space, aside from a coffee table piled with books and a second table to sit at. Reflecting further on his first year, Unger admits that a clock is ticking on his march to the future, and it’s not in the Palácio do Planalto.
On July 1, Unger begins his second year of unpaid leave from Harvard. The university has, he explains, “a rigid rule of a maximum two-year leave, which I entirely support. I don’t believe they have ever broken that rule.”
That means Unger faces a big decision in 2009. According to one knowledgeable source, he makes about $250,000 as a Harvard Law School professor. His net salary as a Brazilian minister, he confides, “is something like $4,000 a month.” He and his wife agree that his Brazilian venture “doesn’t help at all with our expenses back in the United States,” that they’re having problems with tuition bills.
Unger says he’ll decide what to do next year. If he returns to the United States, it could be under the administration of a former “terrific” student named Obama, with whom he’s “kept in touch.” As is the case with his office, packing up the apartment won’t strain him. The only objects in the cavernous living room are two Giacometti-like metallic figures he picked up in Brasília.
Suddenly the old contracts professor again, Unger asks his guest: “Can you identify them?” Why yes — Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” Unger asks.
They are. Isolated in the middle of the floor, they look lonely but committed. Only time will tell if they’re prophetic.n
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 39, Page B6
