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A Neo-Marxist Who Sought Cultural Revolution — Harvard Prof. Roberto Unger

Oct. 19, 2012 11:22am Tiffany Gabbay

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As America reels from the U.S. embassy attacks in Cairo and Benghazi — the latter of which left U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, two Navy SEALs and a civil servant dead — some are questioning where, exactly, President Obama acquired his various domestic and foreign policy stances.

To trace the genesis of the president’s world view, some believe it is imperative to examine the cast of characters woven into the tapestry of the Obama’s life — from his Communist mentor and father-figure, Frank Marshal Davis to his political benefactor Bill Ayers; from his spiritual guiding light Rev Jeremiah Wright, to his Harvard Law Professor, the self-proclaimed Marxist revolutionary, Dr. Roberto Mangabeira Unger.

You might recall Dr. Unger from a scathing video he posted in June entitled, “Beyond Obama,” in which the political theorist called for the president’s defeat in 2012. The reason Unger turned on his former acolyte? Apparently, Obama has not been radical enough for Unger in advancing the cause of progressivism — which is what the professor considers the true calling and nature of the Democratic Party.

In his acerbic monologue, an austere yet distinguished Unger indicted the president on an array of charges including embracing a policy of “food stamps” while abandoning the American worker. Ultimately, Unger said that in order to truly restore the Democratic Party ”as the vehicle for the progressive alternative in the country,” Obama must be defeated.

“President Obama must be defeated in the coming election. He has failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States.”

Unger’s salvo continued as he excoriated the president for pursuing Obamacare at the expense of the overall economy.

So just how progressive is Dr. Roberto Unger?

Hailing from the world’s sixth largest economy, the Roscoe Pound Professor of Law at Harvard University has authored over two dozen books on social theory, legal and economic thought, political alternatives and philosophy in the vein of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School.

Unlike the “father of Communism,” however, Unger believes not in a synchronized mass-nationalization of a country’s means of production, but rather in a world-wide revolution that is achieved subtly and in stages, whereby institutions are “reformed” or replaced one-by-one.

At home in Brazil, Dr. Unger has a long and well-documented history of political activism, working in the country’s early opposition parties against militarism and authoring the founding charter of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party in 1980. Later, he would become affiliated with the far-left Workers Party’ and serve as an adviser on the presidential campaigns for Leonel Brizola and Ciro Gomes.

Unger, too, had his own political aspirations and formed a presidential exploratory committee for himself in 2000 and again in 2006. While his bid was ultimately unsuccessful, the professor did garner a cabinet position in Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s second-term administration as Secretary of Strategic Affairs. Oddly, the relationship between the two men had had a rocky foundation, as Unger frequently penned articles calling for Lula’s administration “the most corrupt of Brazil’s history” and calling for his impeachment.

Alas, the saying goes, “if you can’t beat’em join’em,” and that is precisely what Unger did after Lula’s advisor’s thought it better to bring Unger into the tent, rather than keep him outside of it where he, likely, would do more harm than good.

Unger would hold his cabinet position with Lula from 2007 to 2009. While in his role, Unger reworked Brazil’s national defense strategy and played a key role in forming much of the country’s labor laws.

Still, speculation has abounded that Unger proved too radical even for the pro-Hugo Chavez, pro-Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “Lula” and in 2009 Unger left his cabinet position to return to Harvard.

Professor Unger and his pupil

According to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Remnick’s book, “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” the president took two classes with Unger — Jurisprudence and Reinventing Democracy — both of which were not popular choices among “conventional students,” who considered the conceptual theories embraced by Unger, along with his dry nature, “impenetrable.”

“His course descriptions in the catalogue were impenetrable and you knew he was worse in class,” a former peer of Obama’s told Remnick.

The fact that Obama chose to take not one, but a subsequent class with Unger is perhaps indication alone that the impressionable student was, at least somewhat taken by abstruse the Brazilian political theorist.

According to a scholarly volume authored by Unger for the Harvard University Press, Critical Legal Studies, as a movement, was spawned in the seventies by young Harvard Law scholars who rejected the theoretical framework of traditional American jurisprudence. Indeed, according to Unger, critical legal studies was formed in “the leftist tradition” and its intent was to inform “a practice of politics.”

“The Critical legal studies movement has undermined the central ideas of modern legal thought and put another conception of law in their place,” Unger wrote in his thesis. “This conception implies a view of society and informs a practice of politics.”

“What I offer here is more a proposal that a description,” he continued. “But it is a proposal that advances along one of the paths opened up by a movement of ideas that has defied in exemplary ways perplexing, widely felt constraints upon theoretical insight and transformative effort.”

“Critical legal studies arose from the leftist tradition in modern legal thought and practice. Two over-riding concerns have marked this tradition.”

Of course, critical legal studies was founded on the basis of “critical theory,” the neo-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School — an institute formed by German intelligentsia in 1923 — which for all intents and purposes blended the socio-political theories of Karl Marx with the psychology of Sigmund Freud.

As the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s, academics at the Frankfurt School fled to the U.S. where they inevitably took root in American universities, including Columbia, Princeton, Brandeis, and California at Berkeley.

According to author Dr, Gerald Atkinson, “these intellectual Marxists included Herbert Marcuse, who coined the phrase, ‘make love, not war,’ during the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.”

Atkinson contends that by “promoting the dialectic of ‘negative’ criticism, that is, pointing out the rational contradictions in a society’s belief system, the Frankfurt School ‘revolutionaries’ dreamed of a utopia where their rules governed.” Further, critical theory “had to contain a strongly imaginative, even Utopian strain, which transcends the limits of reality” and, conveniently, its tenets “would never be subject to experimental evidence.”

In other words, Unger, along with others proponents of this school of thought believe their logic and their logic alone is proof enough that critical theory is incontrovertible.

“Only the superior mind was able to fashion the ‘truths’ from observation of the evidence,” Atkinson continues. “There would be no need to test these hypotheses against everyday experience.”

Now recall that Unger’s approach to realizing the full effects of cultural Marxism in both everyday life and in political application was to do so slowly. Likewise, the Frankfurt School and its adherents sought to create a utopia via a “revolution,” but this revolution, according to Atkinson, would only be accomplished by “fomenting a very quiet, subtle and slowly spreading ‘cultural Marxism’ which would apply to culture the principles of Karl Marx bolstered by the modern psychological tools of Sigmund Freud.”

“Thus, ‘cultural Marxism’ became a marriage of Marx and Freud aimed at producing a ‘quiet’ revolution in the United States of America. This ‘quiet’ revolution has occurred in America over the past 30 years. While America slept!”

Unger’s Jurisprudence class, which he once described as “relatively small and very intense,” turned out to be a “radical critique of contemporary Western political thought and legal theory and Obama’s most prolonged academic exposure to the rudiments of Critical Legal Studies.” According to one classmate, Unger’s class was a “multi-step argument” that sought to undermine presumptions of Western legal thought.

The second of Unger’s courses in which Obama enrolled was “Reinventing Democracy,” which offered another critique of Western democracies — or “neo-liberalism” as the professor dubbed it – and explored the path he felt democracy should take.

Of the Reinventing Democracy course, Remnick writes:

“Unger argued against the ‘mandarins’ who presided over contemporary democratic society and tried, in often highly experimental terms, to urge a rethinking of Western institutions. He urged the adoption of a ‘universal social inheritance’ going well beyond the terms of the New Deal.”

Unger maintained throughout his course that, in the late twentieth century, the Democratic Party had failed to follow through on the precedent set in the New Deal. Of course, no class of Unger’s would be complete without a portion dedicated to expounding on the Republican’s capitulation to big-money and the “white” middle-class majority.

“Everyone recognized that this late-twentieth-century exercise in conservative statecraft would not have enjoyed such success had the Democratic Part, and the progressives in general, not abdicated so completely their responsibility to build and to defend a national alternative.” Unger said.

He went on to explain that leftists feared undoing their “defeat” without prompting a “crisis of dimensions” mirroring that of the Great Depression.

Unger’s view of Obama

According to Remnick, Unger has disputed some classmates’ claims that Obama was actually turned off by the theoretical nature of Unger’s curriculum. Rather, the professor noted that Obama “shared in the more philosophical part of the discussion as vigorously as he did the more context-oriented part.”

Unger went so far as to say that presenting his conversations with Obama “under the lens of the trope of philistine activist against starry-eyed theoretician” did both student and professor a great disservice.

Unger, who may have later gone on to be critical of the president, nonetheless defended his acolyte to Remnick, saying that Obama was “always interested in ideas, big and small” and that he “excelled at the style of sociability that is most prized in the American professional and business class.” Unger claims that while Obama did not master the art of “charismatic seduction” during his school days, “he became a virtuoso at it nevertheless.”

Ultimately, Unger viewed Obama, at least at the time “The Bridge” was written, a true American elite, even contending that Obama was “in a real sense, the first American elite president—that is the first who talks and acts as a member of the American elite—since John Kennedy.” Curiously, Unger failed to recall that President George H.W. Bush, too, was an Ivy League graduate and whose family background, much like Kennedy’s (and unlike Obama’s) comprised a legacy of American stature and privilege.

Remnick asserts that Unger continued a correspondence with Obama via BlackBerry even into the presidential campaign, although Unger maintains he never actually became Obama’s “friend.” In fact, the self-proclaimed revolutionary said he specifically kept his distance so as not to hurt the Illinois senator’s presidential bid.

“I am a leftist, and, by conviction as well as temperament, a revolutionary…Any association of mine with Barack Obama in the course of the campaign could only do harm.”

In CONTROL, Glenn Beck presents a passionate, fact-based case for guns that reveals why gun control isn’t really about controlling guns at all; it’s about controlling us. Find out more HERE.

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Comments (66)

springer1521
Posted on March 6, 2013 at 2:02am
Wow we have such a culture of anti-intellectualism, the comments on here affirm that. Unger’s style although somewhat cryptic and foreign provides an incredible amount of fresh thinking. His ability to accurately generalize and summarize the social realities we all face is unfortunately beyond the grasp of like 95% of the people commenting. ( he has written 20 some odd books concerning the nature of self, society, and politics–your really going to reduce him to this idea of a “communist”; or that his ideas are half baked. He has critically reflected on our situation all political orientations and has a lot to prode us to think about)
Those that did contribute something thoughtful, thanks–especially that article in the examiner about Obama and his political base.

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Amicus Curiae
Posted on October 22, 2012 at 9:47am
I tried to listen to his lecture, but failed to learn anything significant. He is an intelectual elitist. All his BS is meant to make a name for himself inside academia. It was (and is) not to be taken as a serious sociological proposal. He does not expect to change the world. He expects to keep his job at Harvard and keep being invited to the cocktail parties given by the other elitists. He is the professional the contrarian muckraker, basically useless.

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adeleeeee
Posted on October 22, 2012 at 1:35am
I watch the clip for 10 mins and do not have any idea what’s his thread of the talk. However, the way his talk very much like a style of Mao. A true Communist for sure. He needs to go… or eliminate Harvard …

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JEANNIEMAC
Posted on October 22, 2012 at 12:29am
http://teamsarah.ning.com/profiles/blogs/global-governancefrom-shadows?xg_source=activity
This information is about the “shadow government” which is controlling our lives. Why not take some time to read it?

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theoldstoryteller
Posted on October 21, 2012 at 8:38pm
Candy Crowley interjected a comment on behalf of President Obama in front of millions of people at the last debate. She has since retracted that statement. Mrs. Crowley should be allowed to retract that statement at Monday night’s debate in front of millions of people!

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sheik
Posted on October 21, 2012 at 9:51am
When I hear ‘inequality’ I know it means redistribution:

taking money out of my pocket to give to the next guy who is either black, brown, muslim or homosexual to make him rule over me.

No thanks.

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norbit
Posted on October 21, 2012 at 3:40am
This is why Obama’s Muslim friends spent $4 million on his behalf to CONCEAL all his college records. The question is why hasn’t the GOP, in FOUR YEARS, ever DEMANDED those records be released? — Why don’t they DEMAND it now, and make it a major issue to expose him for hiding something, if nothing else?

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aconstitutionalistlivesinbrooklyn
Posted on October 20, 2012 at 8:54pm
As you can see from my previous posts, Roberto Unger is no Barack Obama. Its not in his make-up to do the things you have to do to form a political base,and attain and retain power. That’s why Unger teaches and Obama is president. As for his theories, Unger points our that both countries are religious, but he does not account for this. He has no respect, no deference, no reverence for God. He also believes that people will retain their vitality while he heavily taxes them. That simply isn’t true. He also believes he and other like minded people can socially engineer a floor and a ceiling and still retain a vital happy people, like people can be treated like so many Pavlovian dogs. We can’t be. But these ridiculous theories do not prevent Unger from being appointed to the Harvard Law faculty. That is because Unger perpetuates the ruling class. No matter how far out your ideas are, as long as you expound on them brilliantly and perpetuate an entitled, superior ruling class you’re in.

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aconstitutionalistlivesinbrooklyn
Posted on October 20, 2012 at 7:57pm
Post continued:
You have a base of the Daley machine, the far left, the leftist housing advocates, the black community, real estate developers and investment bankers. Normally, a machine politician like Obama would be exposed by leftist muckrakers. But since Obama advanced the left’s agenda, he was left unexposed. So the mystery is solved. If you are a shrewd, calculating, ambitious politician, advancing the leftist agenda, have oratorical skill and charisma, have your dirty dealings and radical associations covered up by the media, have Ivy League credentials, have the media and Hollywood promote you as working for the disadvantaged as a community organizer and civil rights attorney who is also a law lecturer, you could be president too.

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aconstitutionalistlivesinbrooklyn
Posted on October 20, 2012 at 7:50pm
Scott talked about how Obama got to be president. I believe the final piece of the puzzle was filled in by the Washington Examiner, in a special report dated September 20, 2012. It shows how Obama formed his political base. Obama worked for the law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill, & Galland for 10 years. He worked with Davis in the firm’s housing and real estate practice, who would later leave the firm to join Tony Rezko in the real estate development business. Obama’s client, Bishop Arthur Brazier, who was a Saul Alinsky disciple, a South Side Chicago preacher and political operator, an ally of the Daley machine and a member of the city’s progressive and political elite who advanced Obama at every turn. Obama represented Brazier in court and got Brazier off with a $50.00 fine for turning off the heat and hot water in his South Side apartment building in the dead of winter, and then throwing out the 15 tenants. Obama then negotiated a syndication deal that included that building and four or five others with Brazier as the general partner. Obama helped set up four limited partnerships between Brazier and Tony Rezko. He represented ACORN. As chair of the Annenberg challenge he sent ten’s of millions of dollars to Bill Ayers’ projects. As state senator he arranged for 15% of state pension funds to go to minority investment bankers who are among his bundlers to this day. Throw in Reverend Wright and the support of the New Party and you have a base of the Daley mach

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scw
Posted on October 20, 2012 at 3:18pm
Who is Glenn Beck? Why is he advertising for Obumer?? Explain this to me please? Is is mandatory? Do you need the money? I just don’t get it!!!

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thx1138v2
Posted on October 20, 2012 at 2:29pm
The key word in all of this is “theory”. As someone once said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” That is why all utopian philosophies, whether slow or revolutionary, always fail in the end. I think it was Marx who said, “From each according to their abilities. To each according to their needs.” The part he left out is, Who decides what an individual’s abilities and needs are? Under socialist and communist government it is the government, not the individual, that decides and the argument ignores the susceptibilty of the individuals who populate that government to greed, agrandisement, and avarice of all natures.

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Benetto
Posted on October 20, 2012 at 1:06am
Who is the picture of in the background that they want us to see? I don’t want this guy teaching or even living in MY country!!

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