Left and institutions: Marx, Foucault and Mangabeira Unger

Abstract

This article examines and criticizes the intellectual foundations that support the left's understanding of institutions. It argues that the dominant tradition in this field expresses a negative conception of the institutional phenomenon. It takes the work of Karl Marx as the main paradigm of this perspective, which supports a one-dimensional understanding of institutions as a translation of the interests of the dominant classes (section I). It analyzes the updating of this approach in Michel Foucault's conceptions, marked by the thesis that all institutionalization of modernity is based on the disciplinary model of prisons (section II). It concludes, from there, that both positions, Marx's and Foucault's, share a lack of realism and are devoid of imagination, although recognizing in the German thinker a macro orientation and in the French intellectual a micro vision. Finally, it argues that there is another perspective, which takes institutions as promising instruments of innovation, combining analytical realism with programmatic imagination of alternatives, an idea presented in an exemplary way in the social theory of the Brazilian philosopher Mangabeira Unger. It combines the macro and micro plans for the organization and functioning of the institutions (section III).