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. He asks how we can make sense of ourselves without claiming for human beings a miraculous exception to the general regime of nature. For Unger, philosophy must be the mind on fire, challenging the orthodoxies of specialized fields of inquiry without pretending to be a super-science that solves the riddle of reality. He redefines each of the traditional parts of philosophy, from ontology and epistemology to ethics and politics. The World and Us 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. Unger is one of the leading philosophers and social thinkers in the world today. This is the capstone of his lifework.