Knowledge and Politics is a 1975 book by philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. In it, Unger criticizes classical liberal doctrine, which originated with European social theorists in the mid-17th century and, according to Unger, continues to exercise a tight grip over contemporary thought, as an untenable system of ideas. This dominant set of ideas blocks the resolution of problems that liberal doctrine itself identifies as fundamental to human experience. Liberal doctrine, Unger writes, is an ideological prison-house that condemns people living under its spell to lives of resignation and disintegration. In its place, Unger proposes an alternative that he calls the "theory of organic groups," elements of which he finds emergent in partial form in the welfare-corporate state and the socialist state. The theory of organic groups, he contends, offers a way to overcome the divisions in human experience that make liberalism fatally flawed. The theory of organic groups shows how to revise society so that all people can live in a way that is more hospitable to the flourishing of human nature, particularly in enabling people to integrate their private and social natures, achieving a wholeness in life that has previously been limited to the experience of a small elite of geniuses and visionaries.
Overview
Introduction
Unger opens Knowledge and Politics by explaining how he intends to criticize liberal doctrine and how that criticism will help lead to, and elucidate, a positive program: the creation of a nonliberal doctrine of mind and society. He explains that the rationale for this theoretical enterprise is rooted in the human desire to understand the “meaning of life,” specifically, the nature of the bond between the self and the world. Unger contends that the contemporary human moral experience is one of division, between a side of the self that maintains allegiance to the dominant theoretical and political regimes of society, and another side that is drawn to ideals that current modes of thought reject. Under this experience of division, Unger contends, human experience demands “total criticism” of the kind he intends to apply to the doctrine of liberalism.
Unger describes classical liberal doctrine as both a ruling consciousness of society and a metaphysical system, a system of ideas which involves a particular organization of moral sentiments. In human moral experience, liberalism's failure to satisfy the ideal of the self (which Unger later describes as the fullest expression of man's species nature) is experienced as the twin evils of resignation and disintegration. The early liberal thinkers and the classic social theorists understood the radical separations that mark human life, between self and nature, self and others, self and its own roles and works. By undertaking a total criticism of liberal doctrine, particularly by repudiating its distinction between reason and desire, and Unger intends to lay the groundwork for his positive program, the nonliberal social theory that would help to overcome these divisions and give full expression to a range of human feelings and ideas.
Chapter 1: Liberal Psychology
The Antinomy of Theory and Fact
The liberal doctrines of mind and society rejected the medieval view of knowledge which held that all things in nature have intelligible essences. Under the doctrine of intelligible essences, everything can be classified under the word that names its category. Liberal thinkers, in rejecting the doctrine of intelligible essences, realized that there is an infinite number of ways objects and events can be classified, infinite ways the world can be divided up by the mind. Liberalism's rejection of the doctrine of intelligible essences had far-reaching consequences for moral and political views. The rejection of intelligible essences also led to the antinomy of theory and fact, a seemingly insoluble conflict between two ideas that seemed equally plausible but led to equally absurd consequences. The antinomy of theory and fact is the conflict between, on the one hand, the realization that all understanding of facts is mediated by theory, and on the other hand, the belief in an independent comparison of theory and fact. Faced with the antinomy of theory and fact, we ask: how can we assess the power of competing theories, if there is no appeal to facts independently of theories? Kant's metaphysics offered a promising and ingenious solution—namely, locating the source of the antinomy in the division of universal and particular, form and substance, in human thought. The division between the universal and particular is at the heart of the contradictions of liberal thought.
The Principles of Liberal Psychology Unger describes the “unreflective view of mind” that characterizes liberal psychology. According to this unreflective view of mind, the mind is a machine that perceives and understands facts (object-events) through sensations. These sensations can be combined, or split until they are indivisible. Combining sensations does not change them. Facts that have been combined can be analyzed back into their constituent sensations. Hobbes explained that desire is what impels the “mind-machine” to its operations of combination and analysis. What leads desire to choose one course of action over another is the desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain. This account of liberal doctrine's unreflective view of the mind can be reduced to three principles: The principle of reason and desire. The principle that the self is divided between desire, which is the active, desiring, moving part of the self, and understanding, which is the knowing part of the self. The understanding wants nothing; desire can see nothing. What distinguishes human beings is that they desire different things, not that they understand the world differently. The principle of arbitrary desire. This principle holds that desires are arbitrary from the perspective of the understanding. We cannot determine what we should want simply by learning more about the world. Reason cannot be used to justify the content of desires. The principle of analysis. This principle holds that knowledge is the sum of its parts. Operations of the mind by which we acquire knowledge involve either joining discrete sensations into more complex ideas, or breaking these complex ideas down into their building blocks. Underlying the principle of analysis is an idea at the heart of liberal doctrine as a whole: confidence in the primacy of the simple. The principle of analysis, according to Unger, reveals liberalism's incomplete rejection of the doctrine of intelligible essences, and has pernicious effects on social theory, by demoralizing attempts to construct ambitious conceptual systems and discouraging us from trying to understand, and change, social situations as a whole.
Reason and Desire Liberal psychology gives rise to two kinds of moral theory, each of which are caught up in a paradox that Unger calls the antinomy of reason and desire. Both of these moralities are destructive of a true conception of human personality. One moral theory generated under liberal psychology is the morality of desire. This morality defines the good as the satisfaction of desire, and asserts the primacy of the good over the right. Contentment is the condition in which desire is satisfied, and the task of moral theory is to show how we might organize our lives so that we can gain contentment, or happiness. The other moral theory bequeathed by liberal psychology is the morality of reason, which holds that reason alone establishes the standards of right conduct. Unger points out that, in light of liberal doctrine's conviction that reason wants nothing, it might strike us as strange to contend that reason alone is a basis of morality. The basis for the morality of reason is the belief that humans must accept certain rules, offered by reason, to move beyond the exercise of “naked desire” to the possibility of judging right and wrong and justifying our actions to our fellow men. When reason is believed to offer us universal rules for conduct, it is really telling us what principles we would have to accept to engage in moral criticism. The foremost example of the morality of reason is Kant's moral theory.
The moralities of reason and desire are both vulnerable to serious objections. The morality of desire is deficient because it is incapable of passing from description to evaluation of conduct, and thus is unable to lay down standards of justification. Furthermore, the life to which morality of desire points is inadequate; contentment is elusive without any criteria to judge and order the ends of conduct. The morality of reason is inadequate, first, due to the inadequacy of reason to serve as a foundation for any moral judgments and, second, because the moral life as conceived by the moralist of reason is inadequate. The respective inadequacies of moralities of desire and reason generate an antinomy. If morality of desire abandons us to our random and changing appetites, morality of reason suppresses our existence as subjective beings with individual ends. The root of this antinomy of reason and desire is the separation between understanding and evaluation in liberal doctrine.
Personality Unger contends that the psychological principles of liberalism make it impossible to formulate an adequate conception of personality. Unger identifies four dimensions of the minimum idea of personality: continuing identity, common humanity with others, ability to change ends over time while acknowledging continuity of existence, and being a unique individual despite membership in species of like beings. But neither the morality of desire nor morality of reason does justice to these qualities. The morality of desire denies continuity and humanity of the self, seeing the human being led by desire to seek contentment without any criteria for ordering the ends of conduct, while the morality of reason denies the human capacity for moral innovation and individual identity, offering a formal, empty principle of reason as the only guidance to what we ought to do.
The theoretical deficiencies of the liberal conception of personality are mirrored in the experience of the individual in the social world in which the liberal mode of consciousness prevails. The individual is condemned to a state of degradation and division, forced to deal with others in a social world that threatens the person with loss of individuality and loss of autonomy in directing his life, perpetually fleeing to private life for the chance to shed the mask of one's largely unchosen public role. People seek temporal unity in a public identity at the cost of their singularity and uniqueness. As Unger says, “Others save you from being nothing, but they do not allow you to become yourself.” Under liberalism, people are torn between roles that force them to sacrifice their private selves to their public ones, thus surrendering individual identity; or casting off convention and following their own courses, but risking disintegration of the self.
Chapter 2: Liberal Political Theory
The Unreflective View of Society