Knowledge and Politics by Roberto Mangabeira Unger (book review)

Unger's Knowledge and Politics is a rare philosophical endeavor: it is an expression of hope articulated as a theory of human nature and politics. The hope expressed in Unger's work is that the empiricism of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and the corollary thesis of the subjectivity of values and the loss of a theory of the good, is not an accurate description of knowledge and man. Unger criticizes the empiricist's theory of knowledge and the liberal fiction of the isolated and self-sufficient individual, and in their stead reasserts the theory of ontologi-cal values and the social nature of man.