Construction worlds: between empirical social theory and ungerian social theory

Abstract

This paper is organized in two parts. The first one deals with the assumptions of Empirical Social Theory and its direct link in Political Science reflections. Achieves a critique about those internalist markers, emphasizing the consequences of this way of thought inasmuch as politics get embedded from other fields of human knowledge. It also analyzes the assumptions applied by the school of rational choice and the school of neo-institutionalism. The second part discusses the Social Theory offered by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a Brazilian theorist, and his anti-naturalistic theoretical assumptions. His social theory is distinct both from empirical social theory and from Marxism. It introduces an authentic interpretation about politics, which holds a potential to change the paradigm of the theory and practice, fighting against Right-Hegelianism and promoting the role of the human imagination in political action without surrender to a fatalistic fate. It is advocated that Ungerian Social Theory holds potential to strike the hostility of the desert, as Hannah Arendt told.