# Quote — Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Plasticity into Power

> The extreme moment of shock in battle presents in heightened and distorted form some of the distinctive characteristics of a whole society involved in war. These characteristics in turn represent a heightening and distortion of many of the traits of a social world cracked open by transformative politics. The threats to survival are immediate and shifting; no mode of association or activity can be held fixed if it stands as an obstacle to success. The existence of stable boundaries between passionate and calculating relationships disappears in the terror of the struggle. All settled ties and preconceptions shake or collapse under the weight of fear, violence, and surprise. What the experience of combat sharply diminishes is the sense of variety in the opportunities of self-expression and attachment, the value given to the bonds of community and to life itself, the chance for reflective withdrawal and for love. In all these ways, it is a deformed expression of the circumstance of society shaken up and restored to indefinition. Yet the features of this circumstance that the battle situation does share often suffice to make the boldest associative experiments seem acceptable in battle even if they depart sharply from the tenor of life in the surrounding society. Vanguardist warfare is the extreme case. It is the response of unprejudiced intelligence and organized collaboration to violence and contingency.

- Author: [Roberto Mangabeira Unger](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger.md)
- Book: [Plasticity into Power](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/plasticity-into-power.md)
- Page: 160
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Roberto_Mangabeira_Unger#Plasticity_Into_Power:_Comparative-Historical_Studies_on_the_Institutional_Conditions_of_Economic_and_Military_Success_(1987)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/plasticity-into-power/the-extreme-moment

## More from this book

> Society will oscillate between long periods of relative stagnation in which state-protected privileges crowd out experiments in the organization of production and brief interludes in which much is destroyed before anything can be created. To perpetuate the practice of innovation, societies must replace such drastic and violent swings with a more constant liquefaction of deals and privileges. They must invent the structures that make structures easier to change.

p. 192 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/plasticity-into-power/society-will-oscillate.md)

> To come out from under the protective wall of role, habit, and frozen perception, a person must throw himself into a situation of heightened exposure. He must put himself at greater risk to the harm that other people may do to him and to the destructive influence that enlarged experience may have on what he had previously regarded as his enduring core of identity.

p. 12 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/plasticity-into-power/to-come-out.md)

> The utopian element in politics lies in the ability to disentangle the image of possible human association from forms of life that make people's material and moral ability depend on their acceptance of predetermined hierarchical and communal divisions. The struggle of this visionary politics is to deny the identification of society with a limited repertory of social forms. Such a repertory imprisons all experiments in practical collaboration, in self-expression and reconciliation, within a determinate scheme of ranks and divisions, of authoritative ideals, and of accepted contexts for the realization of these ideals.

p. 12 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/plasticity-into-power/the-utopian-element.md)