The Self Awakened shows [Roberto Mangabeira Unger] to be one of the few living philosophers whose thinking has the range of the great philosophers of the past.Unger has a restless and unruly mind, and is, I can report from several personal encounters, one of the most articulate and penetratingly original thinkers one is likely to meet.His thinking and writing have always ranged beyond the boundaries of legal and social theory, to psychology, psychoanalysis, and architecture. In this book, he takes on the task and direction of philosophy itself and draws out implications ranging from the theory and practice of politics, to psychology, to the most fundamental questions about space, time, cosmology, physics, and mathematics.[ The Self Awakened ] is written in a vivid prose style that mixes precise lawyerly argument with poetic and metaphorical passages of astounding vividness. It is a polemic and a call to action, but what it challenges us to do most of all is to experiment with how we live and think. It is many years since I found myself as inspired and provoked by a book of non-fiction. Unger aims at nothing less than to invent a new kind of politics, which is evolutionary in style but revolutionary in outcome.

This is a philosophy as ambitious as any being written now.