# Quote — Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Plasticity into Power

> There is no aspect of a people's collective life that may not have to be abandoned for the sake of meeting a practical challenge, just as there is no aspect they may not have to jettison in order to deal with the visionary appeal in politics. Consequently, the different forms of social life that exist in the world are always less real than they seem; the differences among them subsist on a containment of conflict. If the nations of the world were exposed to constant practical and visionary conflict, none of the differences among them would have any permanence. This does not mean that the peoples would become alike; it does mean that the marks that distinguish their identities would constantly shift hands and that other marks, never before dreamt of, would suddenly appear.

- 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: 169
- 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/there-is-no-aspect

## 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)