Just as the attempt to actualize liberal ideals requires ideas and arrangements unfamiliar to liberals, so the effort to make our moral experience re… - Roberto Mangabeira Unger

There is no permanent canon of forms of normative argument. Our ways of arguing about ideals are, like our other practices, the mutable products of a specific history and the expressions of our ideas about society and thought.

The struggle for counterfactual insight—the attempt to see what things might become along a periphery of possible next steps around how things are now—presents us with what at first seems to be a conundrum of the understanding.... If we cannot close the configuration space of the possible states of affairs and bring them all under the regime of a closed and timeless set of laws, we cannot be sure that we shall be able to fight our way back from our flight of causal inquiry to the recovery of the phenomenal world in its visionary immediacy. We shall be unhappy because our consciousness of the world will remain divided between the poetry of experience and the science of nature.... There is an aspect of our mental life in which we enjoy such a reconciliation. However, its presence there instead of reassuring us ought to arouse and disturb us all the more. It should do so both by suggesting what we lack in the remainder of our conscious experience and by implying that the reconciliation is a mirage, never to be grasped. Dreams regularly join two features, the combination of which eludes us in our waking livesː counterfactual insight and visionary immediacy.

By the structure of society, I mean the institutional and ideological presuppositions that shape the routine practices, conflicts, and transactions in that society, and that are largely taken for granted, even to the point of being invisible, as if they were part of the nature of things. In a free society, this institutional and ideological framework does not present itself as an alien fate beyond the reach of the transformative will and imagination.