THE PROJECT was ambitious for any young scholar: to write a first book that would be the definitive critique of liberal thought and lay the foundation for a new social theory that would replace Weber, Durkheim and Marx.

And if anyone alive will complete the task begun in Knowledge and Politics, it will be Roberto Unger. The stories about his brilliance and dedication to scholarship abound: that he went through law school in two years, that he spent almost all his time at Harvard in the libraries devouring difficult philosophical tracts, and that he is the youngest member of the Law School faculty. He is considered such a whiz-kid that senior professors reportedly flock to his lectures.

But the task was too great for anyone to master in his first work. Unger here is the great synthethizer rather than theoretical innovator. He stands on the shoulders of earlier giants, borrowing but rearranging their ideas to uncover the contradictions in liberal theory.

Unger promises at the outset to utilize, unlike Marx and Weber, a form of "total" rather than "partial" criticism that will "serve as the key that will allow us to escape from the prison house" of paradoxical liberalism, "whose rooms did not connect and whose passageways led nowhere."

He eventually concludes that the fundamental inconsistency in liberal theory is the conflict between what he calls the "universal" and the "particular." Everywhere one is confronted with an inability to apply theory to fact, creating contradictions within both our institutions and our consciousness.

At the simplest level, the problem manifests itself in language. Words are generalizations designed to describe ideal types. Liberal theory assumes that man can know the essence of every object, but words limit the degree to which he can describe a thing; he can never perfectly describe any particular object.

These limitations have led to the increasing simplification and division of societal problems. With the division of the social sciences into fields like government, economics, psychology, analysis has become specialized and at the same time limited. No extensive change is possible so long as each scientist looks at only one part of the problem. Thus, "the principle of analysis is the enemy of revolution."

IN SOME OF his sharpest analysis, Unger shows that the internal contradictions within liberalism lead to a breakdown of law and justice. If the Supreme Court is torn over conflicting interpretations of the Constitution, it is not because the document is poorly constructed, but because general theorems cannot be applied perfectly to specific cases.

The tension between reason and desire is another aspect of the division of the universal and the particular. Liberal theory spawns two views of human consciousness: man as an animal subject to his desires and man as a machine applying reason through knowledge to guide his action. The antinomy is that,

For the will, the moral commands of reason are despotic laws that sacrifice life to duty. Each part is condemned to war against the other.

The playing out of these conflicts can be seen in the gradual emergence of the welfare-corporate state. In this system, culture has triumphed over nature, the state over society and reason over passion. But the underlying tensions of liberal theory remain to make the society unstable.

It may develop into a fully corporate state, in which individuals would be forced to act only within their bureaucratically defined roles, eliminating the interaction of human beings as human beings. Unger finds another possible course of development, the emergence of a socialist regime, equally undesirable. Here the holding of power and the definition of ends would become arbitrary. Even if private property were abolished, the desire for power would not be, and the socialist bureaucracy would provide an effective means of enforcing greater control.

Leftists who read Knowledge and Politics will first criticize Unger for giving such cursory treatment to Marx, though they will probably applaud his critique of liberalism. But because of Unger's logical structure, they cannot accept too much of what he says. The arguments he uses against liberalism can be turned against Marxism with almost equal force.

UNGER, in a rather desultory manner, calls Marxism the best previous refutation of liberalism, but rejects it as a useful theory. He criticizes its historical determinism, its concern with the distribution of wealth and the emphasis on the means of production. He says it fails to resolve the antimony of theory and fact and "does not penetrate the realm of the consciousness." And yet he adopts one of Marx's more humanistic concepts, that of the species-being.

Man comes closest to "universal harmony" in two forms of human activity, work and love. Unger's views about the value of work seem adapted from Marx, but he avoids the concept of alienation and sees no need for the worker to be a jack-of-all-trades. Unger accepts the continued division of labor, though he says it is moderated and refined to prevent the worker from feeling apart from the larger product.