The World and Us

In The World and Us, Roberto Mangabeira Unger sets out to reinvent philosophy. His central theme is the relation between transcendence and finitude in human experience: how everything in our existence points beyond itself, and yet our mortal lives and the world around us remain enigmas. For Unger, philosophy must be the mind on fire, insisting on our prerogative to speak to what matters most. It must challenge the orthodoxies of specialized fields of inquiry without pretending to be a super-science that solves the riddle of reality.

From this perspective, he redefines each of the traditional parts of philosophy, from ontology and epistemology to ethics and politics. He turns moral philosophy into an exploration of the contest between the two most powerful contemporary moral visions: an ethic of self-fashioning and an ethic of human connection. And he transforms political philosophy into a program of deep freedom, showing how to democratize the market economy, energize democratic politics, and give the individual worker and citizen the means to flourish amid permanent innovation.