Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Unger's maternal grandfather was Octávio Mangabeira, who served as Brazil's minister of foreign affairs in the late 1920s before the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas subjected him to a series of imprisonments and exiles in Europe and the United States.

After returning to Brazil in 1945, he co-founded a center-left party.

He was elected as a representative in the Câmara Federal in 1946, governor of Bahia in 1947, and Senator in 1958.

Both of Unger's parents were intellectuals.

His German-born father, Artur Unger, from Dresden, arrived in the United States as a child and later became a U.S. citizen.

His mother, Edyla Mangabeira, was a Brazilian poet and journalist.

Artur and Edyla met in the US during the exile of Octávio Mangabeira.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (born 24 March 1947) is a Brazilian philosopher, jurist and politician.

His work is in the tradition of classical social theory and pragmatism, and is developed across many fields including legal theory, philosophy and religion, social and political theory, progressive alternatives, and economics.

In natural philosophy he is known for The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time.

In social theory he is known for Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory.

In legal theory he was associated with the Critical Legal Studies movement, which helped disrupt the methodological consensus in American law schools.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1947, and spent his childhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

He attended the private Allen-Stevenson School.

When he was eleven, his father died and his mother moved the family back to Brazil.

He attended a Jesuit school and went on to law school at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Unger was admitted to Harvard Law School in September 1969.

After receiving his LLM, Unger stayed at Harvard another year on a fellowship, and then entered the doctoral program.

At 23 years old, Unger began teaching jurisprudence, among other things, to first year students.

The beginning of Unger's academic career began with the books Knowledge and Politics and Law in Modern Society, published in 1975 and 1976 respectively.

These works led to the co-founding of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) with Duncan Kennedy and Morton Horwitz.

The movement stirred up controversy in legal schools across America as it challenged standard legal scholarship and made radical proposals for legal education.

In 1976, aged 29, he got SJD and became one of the youngest faculty members to receive tenure from Harvard Law School.

By the early 1980s, the CLS movement touched off a heated internal debate at Harvard, pitting the CLS scholars against the older, more traditional scholars.

Throughout much of the 1980s, Unger worked on his magnum opus, Politics: A Work In Constructive Social Theory, a three volume work that assessed classical social theory and developed a political, social, and economic alternative.

The series is based on the premise of society as an artifact, and rejects the necessity of certain institutional arrangements.

Published in 1987, Politics was foremost a critique of contemporary social theory and politics; it developed a theory of structural and ideological change, and gave an alternative account of world history.

His political activity helped the transition to democracy in Brazil in the aftermath of the military regime, and culminated with his appointment as Brazil's Minister of Strategic Affairs in 2007 and again in 2015.

His work is seen to offer a vision of humanity and a program to empower individuals and change institutions.

At the core of his philosophy is a view of humanity as greater than the contexts in which it is placed.

He sees each individual possessed with the capability to rise to a greater life.

At the root of his social thought is the conviction that the social world is made and imagined.

His work begins from the premise that no natural or necessary 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 individual and collective empowerment.

Doing so, he holds, will enable human liberation.

Unger has long been active in Brazilian opposition 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 and in the second Dilma administration.