He argues for the reconstruction of legal analysis as a discipline of institutional imagination. He shows how a changed practice of legal analysis can help us re-imagine and reshape the dominant institutions of representative democracy, market economy and free civil society. The search for basic social alternatives, largely abandoned by philosophy and politics, can find in such a practice a new point of departure.
Unger criticizes the dominant, rationalizing style of legal doctrine,
with its obsessional focus upon adjudication and its urge to suppress or contain conflict or contradiction in law. He shows how we can turn legal analysis into a way of talking about the alternative institutional futures of a democratic society. The programmatic proposals of Unger's Politics are here placed within a wider field of possibilities. A major concern of the book is to explore how professional specialties such as legal thought can inform the public debate in a democracy. The book exemplifies this connection: Unger's arguments are accessible to those with no specialized knowledge of law or legal theory.
| Subject and plan of this book | 1 | |
| Insight and transformation in natural science and social study | 2 | |
| Democracy and experimentalism | 6 | |
| The practical promise of democratic experimentalism: from the existing policy debate to the missing programmatic conversation | 11 | |
| The imagination of alternatives: social-theoretical assumptions of democratic experimentalism | 18 | |
| The disciplinary tools of democratic experimentalism | 22 | |
| The arrested development of legal thought | 26 | |
| Complex enforcement at the threshold of structural change | 30 | |
| The spell of rationalizing legal analysis | 34 | |
| The complex structure of legal consciousness | 41 | |
| Interest-group pluralism and rationalizing legal analysis | 52 | |
| The fourfold root of rationalizing legal analysis: the prejudice against analogy | 59 | |
| The fourfold root of rationalizing legal analysis: upholding a regime of rights | 63 | |
| The fourfold root of rationalizing legal analysis: pessimistic progressive reformism | 78 | |
| The fourfold root of rationalizing legal analysis: the commanding role of the judge | 106 | |
| Kenosis: escaping the misdirections of contemporary theory | 119 | |
| Legal analysis as institutional imagination | 129 | |
| Imagining the alternative futures of a free society: extended social democracy | 135 | |
| Imagining the alternative futures of a free society: radical polyarchy | 148 | |
| Imagining the alternative futures of a free society: mobilizational democracy | 163 | |
| The campaign to split the difference between rationalism and historicism | 170 | |
| Prophecy and prostration in legal thought | 182 | |
| Index | 193 |
Overview
He argues for the reconstruction of legal analysis as a discipline of institutional imagination. He shows how a changed practice of legal analysis can help us re-imagine and reshape the dominant institutions of representative democracy, market economy and free civil society. The search for basic social alternatives, largely abandoned by philosophy and politics, can find in such a practice a new point of departure.
Unger criticizes the dominant,...