Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a Brazilian contemporary social theorist and politician. He has been a longtime professor at Harvard University in the United States and is known by his work in the 1970s/80s while at Harvard Law School as part of the Critical Legal Studies movement, which is held to have helped disrupt the methodological consensus in American law schools. He has also been active throughout his life in Brazilian politics as a proponent of an alternative direction for the country. He was Brazilian Minister of Strategic Affairs in 2007 and again in 2015, in the administrations of Presidents Lula and Dilma Rousseff, in a portfolio created for him to propose initiatives that would lead to a new model of national development.

He is the author, among other works, of Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative (Verso, 1998), España y su futuro (Sequitur, 2009) as a result of his longtime interest in Spanish affairs, The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound, Harvard, 2007, Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics, Princeton University Press, 2007, The Left Alternative, Verso, 2009, and The religion of the future (Verso Books, 2016), his most recent philosophical work.