# Quote — Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Plasticity into Power

> 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.

- 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: 12
- 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-utopian-element

## 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 imperative of plasticity requires that advances in productive or destructive powers be achieved through the subversion of fixed plans of social division and hierarchy and of stark contrasts between task setting and task following. All possible combinations have to be tried out, as quickly and as freely as possible. The only structure that can be allowed to subsist is one that offers the fewest obstacles to this principle of pitiless recombination.

p. 208 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/plasticity-into-power/the-imperative-of-plasticity.md)