The radicals want something of the quality of the hot moments of social life—the periods of accelerated collective mobilization—to pass into the cold… - Roberto Mangabeira Unger

... 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.

Society will oscillate between long periods of relative stagnation in which state-protected privileges crowd out experiments in the organization of production and brief interludes in which much is destroyed before anything can be created. To perpetuate the practice of innovation, societies must replace such drastic and violent swings with a more constant liquefaction of deals and privileges. They must invent the structures that make structures easier to change.

The structures of society and culture are fighting turned to stone; they are what comes into existence so long and insofar as we interrupt our practical and ideological struggles over the organization of life in society. When the fighting escalates again, the structures dissolve into the collective action and imagination from which they arose. When we fashion structures design to invite their own reconstruction, we make them into both superior instruments of our power and more faithful reflections of our humanity.