What Should Legal Analysis Become

Abstract

This work brings together the legal work and social theory of the author, Roberto Mangabeira Unger. 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. search for the 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. programmatic proposals of Ungers politics are here placed within a wider field of possibilities. A major concern of the book is to explore how professional specialities, such as legal thought, can inform the public debate in a democracy. book exemplifies this connection: Unger's arguments are accessible to those with no specialized knowledge of law or legal theory. Roberto Mangabeira Unger is the author of The Critical Legal Studies Movement, Passion: An Essay on Personality and False Necessity: Antinecessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy.

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