A Critique of Liberalism: The Application of Unger's Knowledge and Politics to Rawls's Theory of Justice

Extract

In Knowledge and Politics Roberto Mangabeira Unger offers an extended critique of liberalism. He formulates a conception of liberalism as a framework of ideas that is embodied in particular institutions and practices, constituting a way of life and a form of consciousness. He evaluates this liberal framework, its crystallization in the seventeenth century, its powerful but unacknowledged hold over developed Western societies, its fragmentation into specialized perspectives, its dilemmas of thought and practice, and the possible emergence of an alternative framework. Our reading of Knowledge and Politics initially led us both to a provisional agreement with Unger and to the realization that if his project is successful he has made a contribution of great importance to political theory. Our hesitation in fully endorsing his theory was due to this characteristic of Knowledge and Politics: while Unger often refers to individual liberal thinkers for purposes of illustration, he does not systematically apply his critique to any theorist. He realizes that he might be accused of erecting and toppling a “straw man,” for he states that “it might be objected that the view I discuss is a view nobody has ever held.” He acknowledges that the liberal framework he constructs is not intended to fit exactly the thought of particular liberal theorists, that his references to philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke and Hume “are designed to illustrate rather than to prove their adherence to the doctrines that are the subject of the critique. In this sense, the critical argument remains hypothetical.”