The Inertia of Institutional Imagination: A Reply to Roberto Unger

Much of Roberto Unger's recent work renews his earlier call for an empowerment of politics, involving our constant alertness to the possibilities of change, the revisability of those possibilities and the removal of all that falsely presents itself as unrevisable. Details aspects of this 'institutional imagination', and argues that Unger invests too much in it. While he is right to say that the system's inertia can be shaken from within, the endeavour cannot carry through to those constitutive assumptions that underlie the institutional identity.