The Dictatorship of No Alternatives

Since 2007, Unger has served as Brazil’s minister for strategic affairs. His life has followed a long road of switchback turns through the moun-tains of philosophy and politics. Until middle age, the Brazilian American theorist lived almost like a monk, buried in books at Harvard, where he was granted tenure at age twenty-nine. His dense theoretical projects culminated in a trilogy titled Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory, which found a small but devoted audience. The late American philosopher Richard Rorty wrote of Unger, “He does not make moves in any game we know how to play . . . His book may someday make possible a new national romance.”

In the 1990s, Unger stepped up his flirtation with traditional politics, especially in Latin America, looking for a way to harness market forces to democratic ends. He has been, briefly, a mayoral candidate in São Paolo and a presidential candidate for all of Brazil, as well as the adviser to a strange mix of politicians, including former Mexican president Vicente Fox. Unger now works for Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Though it’s still too early to tell whether his thinking will bear fruit in Brazil, his fresh ideas demand attention. His argument that we can at once deepen democracy, enhance social security, and foster economic innovation and growth is developed across a trio of books, Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative, What Should the Left Propose? and Free Trade Reimagined. The scale and scope of the proposals are breathtaking, encompassing the entirety of human society, from the individual to global institutions. He claims his basic ideas are as valid for the rich world as for the poor, with minor adjustments.

To prepare his case, Unger attempts to shatter conventional wisdom. First, he asks us to reject, as a “false necessity,” the notion that the institutions of democracies, markets, and civil societies must resemble those of Europe or North America to be successful. Rather, he argues, the more we experiment with different kinds of institutions, the better. Second, he throws out the distinction between reform and revolution, or partial versus systemic change. Instead, by making a series of thoughtful revisions, we can achieve revolutionary change step by step, knowing only in outline where we’ll end up. He calls this a “direction, not a blueprint.” While the right and left continue to fight over how much we should entrust to the market and how much the state should regulate and plan, Unger asks us to step back and ask, What kind of market? What kind of state?

The starting point is his view of today’s global economy, starkly divided between a small, interconnected international vanguard of highly productive, innovative firms that drive most economic growth, and a rearguard: everybody else. (These vanguard firms are generally of the high-tech variety, though Unger suggests that the best commando units and the best symphonies work similarly.) This presents the obvious problem that too much wealth and power is being concentrated in the hands of too few. But for Unger it also presents a deeper problem — and as such an opportunity.

What these vanguard practices come down to, he argues, is a profoundly liberating environment with little hierarchy and plenty of overlap between making and implementing decisions, a fertile blend of co-operation and competition, and permanent trial and error. For the privileged few who work in this way, the reward isn’t just money; it’s also the chance to explore one’s creativity and freedom with little restraint. The point of these proposals is to transcend the debate over how much the government should regulate the market. Unger believes the vanguard is too small and vital to bear the burden of sufficient taxation and welfare spending to reduce inequality substantially. The key, therefore, is to expand the vanguard practices.

Spreading vanguard practices throughout the economy isn’t just a method for increasing productivity. Equally important is empowering people “to live a big life, transfigured by ambition, surprise and struggle . . . to make better use of everyone’s dormant energies and to establish in the mind of the ordinary man and woman the idea and the experience of their own power.” The idea is that expanding social solidarity and accelerating technological innovation aren’t opposing values that need to be balanced, but rather two mutually reinforcing goals that form a virtuous circle. Thus, he argues in Free Trade Reimagined, such a “factory of innovation” actually “provides in microcosm a model for the remaking of all society.”

This can’t happen, Unger argues, without deepening democracy by “raising the temperature before quickening the tempo” of politics. One simple step, he suggests, is to give both political parties and social movements equal free time on television to explain their ideas. He also emphasizes the need to develop strategies for mixing participatory and representative democracy to make decisions more quickly, decentralize power, and experiment with different legal regimes. Strengthening and deepening democratic accountability is also crucial if governments are to foster factories of innovation. This allows citizens to rein in the nepotism or incompetence of public servants charged with democratizing the market.

To increase investment and spread vanguard practices, Unger suggests the state set up a series of organizations to do the work of venture capitalists, investing in and providing guidance to small, innovative firms while inventing new legal structures that would allow them to co-operate and compete with one another at the same time. The stock market was never any good at providing funds for fledgling, creative firms; now, as it skids and crashes, it’s even easier to appreciate Unger’s proposal.

More generally, Unger advocates an overhaul of our vision of free trade. Today it focuses on the free movement of things (goods, services, money) no matter what, while the movement of labour is tightly restricted by immigration laws, and the movement of ideas restricted by aggressive intellectual property treaties. Unger calls for reversing the priorities, freeing the movement of people and ideas — the twin cores of innovation, as well as what we value most outside the economy — while moving things only to the extent that they help democratic societies transform themselves and prosper as they choose.