We do not live that we may become more godlike. We become more godlike that we may live. We turn to the future to live in the present. The practices … - Roberto Mangabeira Unger

[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, with time, every social or mental structure in which he moves.

The view of human society and personality that informs this argument refuses the consistently disappointing and misleading attempt to distinguish a permanent core and a variable periphery of human nature. It takes into account the loose, contradictory, and complex set of motivations and aspirations that people demonstrate in the societies it wants to reform. It recognizes that even the most intimate and seemingly unyielding of these propensities are influenced and cumulatively remade by the institutional and imaginative context in which they exist. But it rejects as unrealistic any institutional scheme whose success requires a sudden and drastic shift in what people are like here and now.

For all the classic social theorists, the effort to state a comprehensive view of men and society was inseparable from an interest in understanding the condition and prospects of their age. In this they simply repeated the eternal lesson that all deep thought begins and ends in the attempt to grasp whatever touches one most immediately.