Book review: Unger, R.M. 2005: What should the Left propose? London: Verso. 179 pp. £15 cloth. ISBN: 1 84467 048 1
Abstract
Book reviewUnger, R.M. 2005: What should the Left propose? London: Verso. 179 pp. £15 cloth. ISBN: 1 84467 048 1 SAGE Publications, Inc.2008DOI: 10.1177/03091325080320020907 John Agnew University of California, Los Angeles War and catastrophe, not the dynamics of capital accumulation or the evolution of social con ict ripening into revolution, have been the primary levers of social change in modern history. So, rather than awaiting the fruits of such ripening or the off chance that a war or catastrophe will give rise to conditions amenable to progressive political change – diminished inequality and enhanced democratic control over all spheres of life – it is past time to imagine and work actively for such change. This is the basic premise of Unger's brief (179 pp.) but bold book: the manifesto that follows on from a series of books on `anti-necessitarian' social theory he has published over the past ten years. A Brazilian legal scholar who taught for many years at Harvard Law School, Unger here outlines a positive programme of progressive political change that is based on the idea of `experimenting' with institutional reshaping that can take different forms in different places and that rejects both the absolute pri-