Law in Modern SocietyRoberto Mangabeira Unger

Josip KregarTuesday, December 10, 2014

UngerRoberto Mangabeira Unger (born

March 24, 1947) is a philosopher, social theorist, and politician. His writings offer a comprehensive view of our humanity, and present a path by which humankind and each individual can hope to rise to a greater life. He has developed his views across many fields including social, political, legal, and economic theory in what he says is an effort to realize the modernist project of the world made and imagined

Law

At the root of Unger’s thought is the conviction that the world is made and imagined. His work begins from the premise that no natural social, political, or economic arrangements underlie individual or social behavior. Property rights, liberal democracy, wage labor—for Unger, these are all historical artifacts that have no necessary relation to the goals of free and prosperous human activity. For Unger, the market, the state, and human social organization should not be set in predetermined institutional arrangements, but need to be left open to experimentation and revision according to what works for the project of the empowerment of humanity.

What is modern society?

• Postindustrial• Individualism• Secular• Democratic and liberal• Network society• Global• Education? Modern Law

• Uncertainity• Superficial• Different• InequalWhat is a modern Law?

Modern Law: Historical Development

1. Customary or Interactional law

2. Bureaucratic or regulatory law

3. Legal order or legal system

They exist simultanously

Customary or Interactional law

Law as universal phenomenon common to all societies

Simple habitualization Recurring mode of interactionNo separation society/lawInterpretation by “prophets” (khady justice)Neither public nor positive

Bureaucratic or regulatory law

• Not universal• Public• Positive• Regulatory tool (intention teleos)• Limited (custom, sacred law)

Bureaucratic or regulatory law

Separation between society and law (state): law is an object of will

Disintegration of community – no prior condition to individual rights

Division of labour – the authonomy of group rules

Tensions –law is an instrument of the power interests groups that control the state

Legal order or legal system

Law as legal order is committed o being general and autonomous as well as public and positive

Legal order or legal system

Authonomy has substantive, an institutional, methodological and occupational aspect.

Substantive – law can not impose values or ideology

Institutional – specialised institutionsMethodology – a way of legitimization specific

to institutionsOccupation –legal profession

Legal order or legal system

Liberal society cannot resolve social order by mere imoisition of law (human rights?)

No higher divine law+Group pluralism=rights and laws

Law is response to decline of order

1. Closely integrated community – custom

law

2. Rulers and state – bureaucratic law

3. Modern society and liberal democracy

– legal order