Unger's "Democratic Experimentalism"

From legal theorist Roberto Unger's work comes a torrent of new ideas, chief among them his call for "democratic experimentalism."

Against the tear of technological wonders pouring out of the world's laboratories and science clusters, the pace of democratic innovation among developed nations is glacial.

In Canada, efforts at democratic reform have largely been limited to the country's electoral system, Senate and Constitution.

Such limits are misguided, says famed Harvard legal theorist Roberto Unger, and are the result of confusing democracy with a system of interlocking institutions rather than a platform for open innovation.

In Unger's view, argued in more than a dozen densely worded treatises that belie a fierce, distinctively Latin American intellect, democratic innovation and pluralism would accelerate exponentially. Democracy would become as much a platform for experimentation as the latest iPhone source code.

In 2007, Unger began his own political experiment when he left the confines of the faculty club for a two-year immersion at the centre of Brazilian politics. He joined Lula’s government as the minister for long-term planning, bringing with him a legendary impatience for both the scope and speed of reform.

Among Unger's targets: shaking up tired bureaucracies and legislatures, which he argues should be periodically reconstructed from the ground-up – a move as necessary and healthy to Unger as changing the bed sheets. On the subject of free trade, he argues global labour should enjoy the same radical mobility as inanimate goods – a stance that makes labour mobility in the EU look at once futuristic to anyone living in the Americas and still entirely inadequate to the scale of his vision.

Arguing against the “false necessity” of the status quo, his brand of high-energy citizen politics emphasizes the rekindling of public imagination and demands a profound empathy through which democracy itself is redefined. No longer the aggregate of individual interests, it becomes a transcendent process of continual learning and reinvention.

Unger replaces a view of politics as parliamentary wrangling with a bracing vision, one that entails a shared responsibility for the expansion of human freedom through the achievement of greater subsidiarity, new institutional settlements and norms.

To Unger, ideas count because a vigorous public imagination injects politics with passion, and passion provides the energy to overcome the natural entropy that gradually arrests even the most progressive movements.

Against those inclined to regard his ideas as impossibly utopian, he can count one admirer and former student who Sunday secured the most important health reform in a generation, expanded access to his nation's colleges and remodeled one sixth of the U.S. economy: US President Barack Obama.