[T]he quest for a social world that can better do justice to a being whose most remarkable quality is precisely the power to overcome and revise, wit… - Roberto Mangabeira Unger

This enlarged view of the radical cause ... allows us to connect leftism and modernism, the radical politics of institutional reform and the radical politics of personal relations, a political vision obsessed with issues of dependence and domination and a moral vision concerned with the inability of the individual to gain practical, emotional, or even cognitive access to other people without forfeiting his independence.

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 impulse of iconoclasmː refusing unconditional reality and value to the contingent and flawed worlds we build and affirming that there will always be more in us, individually and collectively, than there can ever be in them. The most complete expression of this iconoclastic commitment is the development of forms of life and consciousness that provide us with the means and occasions to resist and reform them. In this way, they save us from having to choose between engaging wholeheartedly in them and keeping the last word, of resistance and transcendence, to ourselves.