Democratic experimentalism sees the core of the good of human liberation in a softening of the tension between two great competing demands upon our v… - Roberto Mangabeira Unger

The imagination works by a principle of sympathy with the suppressed and subversive elements in experience. It sees the residues, memories, and reports of past or faraway social worlds and neglected or obscure perceptions as the main stuff with which we remake our contexts. It explains the operation of a social order by representing what the remaking of this order would require. It generalizes our ideas by tracing a penumbra of remembered or intimated possibility around present or past settlements, and it then subhjects this enlarged sense of possibility to the tests of further comparison and practice. By all these means it undermines the identification of the actual with the possible.

We cannot form and enhance personality without encouraging strong impulse and strong vision in the individual. Such impulse and such vision must seek a collective voice and a social expression.

The relation of politics to personality in this deepening of democracy has a scope broader than the need to economize on political virtue. One way to explore this relation is to consider the bearing of a program like the one outlined here upon two great sources of human sadnessː the loss of vitality and the disproportion between such vitality as we keep and the activities normally available for its expression.