“To understand society deeply is always to see the settled from the angle of the unsettled. The settled is the region or the moment where relationships become fixed and, through their fixity, take on a specious aura of necessity. The unsettled is the experience that discloses the perilous, uncertain, malleable quality of society. By seeing the settled unsettled or by looking toward the disturbances that take place in its vicinity, we begin to understand how the settled really works and what it really is.”

—  Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Source: Social Theoryː Its Situation and Its Task (1987), p. 65

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Roberto Mangabeira Unger 94
Brazilian philosopher and politician 1947

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