Reviews for The future of American progressivism

The average rating for The future of American progressivism based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-01-14 00:00:00 Dillon Jones tl;dr - this is not the Roberto Unger you are looking for. Heard Roberto Unger on the Economist and was pretty intrigued - the call for radical transformation of public institutions via experimentation/innovation was in my wheelhouse. The most charitable reading would be: Unger and West were pretty forward thinking (this is published in the late 90s, after all), for anticipating the growing challenge of inequality to the country (they call this the economic vanguard vs the rearguard) and for laying out a program of labor reskilling/continuous learning, health care/education, and innovative vehicles for capital investment via quasi-public institutions. Here's their argument in a nutshell: 1) As a country we are characterized by a "belief that Americans can make themselves and remake their society, that they can make everything new" (4) 2) ...through the "faith in the genius of ordinary men and women" (11) 3) ...confronting problems 'through human effort and ingenuity. Americans resist seeing particular problems as the manifestation of hidden, hard constraints. They believe that the terrors of vast problems yield to the effects of many small solutions." Progressives, though, have abandoned innovation and experimentation; the left has lost imagination and mostly worries about the rollback of older transfer programs or treating the symptoms of inequality. We need a new spirit of collective action, one that is local and bottom up, that uses market institutions and is open-minded and innovative about new institutional arrangements that will reduce inequality. ...intellectually, there's a lot to like here - and maybe that's enough? But, ugh, that reading would be so charitable that it would ignore the haphazardly argued, loopy book that actually got written. There are some nice turns of phrase, but as a collection of words that either calls you to action or coherently explains the argument sketched above, Future of American Progressivism is pretty disappointing. Here, as briefly as possible, are some of those problems: 1) Vague, to the point where it's not clear what's being argued. As in, if this was a term paper, it would be fair to return it with a note at the top that said "You only need to write one introductory paragraph for your argument, not 6." You simply can't sustain the amount of throat-clearing that happens here while finding time to lay out an argument this big in 93 short pages. 2) What shoulders do they stand on? or not stand on? At some points, I found myself writing 'is this Hayek?' in the marginalia. Walt Whitman and John Stuart Mill make a fleeting appearance, and there are some head nods to the Jeffersonian democratic thinking v. 0.1, but that's about it. This is especially weird considering that Cornel West is involved, and that guy is the most erudite speaker I've ever heard. 3) It's totally unclear what kind of innovation they want - and in fact, the political program laid out probably doesn't get anywhere close to the grand 'new method of politics' pronouncements in pt. 1. Concrete things that get said: privatize social security, replace income tax with consumption tax, try more public contracting or privatization of utilities, job training, and state-owned venture capital funds. The last one (public venture capital) is interesting, but like 2/3 of the other stuff got proposed by Bush 43, which I can't imagine was Cornel West's point.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-02-03 00:00:00 Brett Gulden Good starting point for progressive thinking but the common thread throughout is this. Are you the progressive thinker or are you spoon fed the progressive viewpoint and then believe it’s yours.