Unger, Roberto Mangabeira

Autor: Unger, Roberto Mangabeira
Rok: 1947-

Biogr./Hist. údaje: Americký profesor právních věd, filozof a brazilský politik, práce z právní teorie, filosofie, sociální teorie, politologie, historie náboženského myšlení a ekonomiky.
Zdroj: Autoritní databáze Národní knihovny ČR

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (born March 24, 1947) is a philosopher and politician. His work offers a vision of humanity and a program for society aimed at empowering individuals and changing institutions. He has developed his views and positions across many fields, including social, political, and economic theory. In legal theory, he is best known by his work in the 1970s and 80s as part of the Critical Legal Studies movement, which helped disrupt the methodological consensus in American law schools. His political activity helped bring about democracy in Brazil, and culminated with his appointment as the Brazilian Minister of Strategic Affairs in 2007 and again in 2015.Unger was educated in Brazil and the United States. He studied law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and was awarded a research doctorate by Harvard after he had already been teaching there for several years.Unger views humanity as greater than the contexts in which it is placed. He sees each individual possessed of the capability to rise to a greater life. At the root of his social thought is the conviction that the world is made and imagined. His work begins from the premise that no natural social, political, or economic arrangements underlie individual or social activity. Property rights, liberal democracy, wage labor—for Unger, these are all historical artifacts that have no necessary relation to the goals of free and prosperous human activity. For Unger, the market, the state, and human social organization should not be set in predetermined institutional arrangements, but need to be left open to experimentation and revision according to what works for the project of the empowerment of humanity. Doing so, he holds, will enable the realization of the full extent of human potential and, as he puts it, “make us more god-like.”Unger has long been active in Brazilian oppositional politics. He was one of the founding members of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party and drafted its manifesto. He directed the presidential campaigns of Leonel Brizola and Ciro Gomes, ran for the Chamber of Deputies, and twice launched exploratory bids for the Brazilian presidency. He served as the Minister of Strategic Affairs in the second Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration. He is currently working on social and developmental projects in the Brazilian state of Rondônia.