웅거의 사회변혁이론 = Roberto Unger on Transformation of Society

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay gives an overview of Unger`s political thought, mainly expressed in The Self Awakened(Harvard Univ. Press, 2007), and evaluates positively the applicability of his programs to the political circumstance of Korea. Unger declares himself as a pragmatist experimentalist. In spite of his harsh critiques on the naturalistic bias of the American pragmatism, he has a big ambition to revitalize the creative elements of the human agency, futurity and experimentalism latent in the philosophy of pragmatism. He attempts to connect this creative reconstruction with Cusa`s idea of the infinity and inexhaustibility of human spirit. Based upon the divinization project of becoming more godlike, Unger launches two political projects to deepen democracy, and to empower individuals and, consequentially develops a theory for transforming the nature of relation between social structure and human individual. He overcomes simultaneously the weak points of the super-theory and the ultra-theory with his full-fledged themes such as negative capability and formative contexts. His theory of transformation can be understood as a transformational generative theory of society in the sense of Chomsky or a theory of creative evolution of society in the context of Bergson. Unger decidedly refused marxist deterministic theory or deep theory in False Necessity, though he utilized key concepts coined by the marxist tradition so as to criticize the modern capitalist societies. His theoretical stance seems to be broadly similar to that of Max Weber who averts the determinist tendency of Marxism and the rationalization tendency of the positivist social science at once. On the one hand, Unger subverts Weber`s pessimist view over the modern capitalist society from the leftist romantic perspective. On the other hand, he rejects the Marxist assumption of indivisibility of whole social structure with the help of the ``formative contexts``. By way of formative contexts and their transformation, he proposes the way to the revolutionary reform between revolution and reformist tinkering. His logic of social transformation is defined as the theory of permanent revolution or the continuous substitutions of individual formative contexts. He offers a set of experimental political programs which support the high-energy democratic politics, popular participation, and new governance in the different levels of politics. His core proposals for democratization of the market is to establish a new experimentalist type of production and property law through the flexible reorganization of economy and guarantee of social inheritance or life-long education for the individuals. His main idea is the program for building and empowering small islands of social-cooperative property and production in the ocean of capitalist economy. His radical-democratic experimentalist proposals can not be accepted as the direct expression of socialist imagination, rather as a beginning platform for the most plastic society friendly to the human emancipation.