Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Roberto Mangabeira Unger, born March 24, 1947, is a Brazilian philosopher and politician whose work spans legal theory, philosophy and religion, social and political theory, progressive alternatives, and economics. In legal theory he was associated with the critical legal studies movement, which helped disrupt the methodological consensus in American law schools; in social theory he is known for Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory, and in natural philosophy for The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. At the core of his philosophy is a view of humanity as greater than the contexts in which it is placed, and his social thought holds that property rights, liberal democracy, and wage labor are historical artifacts with no necessary relation to the goals of free and prosperous human activity, so that the market, the state, and human social organization should stay open to experimentation and revision. He has long been active in Brazilian opposition politics, was a founding member of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party and drafted its manifesto, 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, and he served as Brazil's Minister of Strategic Affairs under both the second Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration and the second Dilma administration.