As work permits a reconciliation of man and nature, love is the catalyst to the growth of a genuine spirit of community. The welfare-corporate state promotes a perverse love, an admiration of certain physical or moral attributes that deny the lover recognition as an individual. The person who experiences personal love, breaks away from the rational principles of liberalism: he is willing to put the safety of a lamb above the welfare of the flock. The promotion of this kind of love and its extension to relationships throughout the community is a prerequisite to the emergence of a more coherent society.

In tones as strong as those of the Communist Manifesto, Unger implores us:

All men should work toward the day when the priority of the fight against domination to the development of community will be reversed. Then at last will the calling of modern politics have been answered.

Unger here is at the precipice of his analysis. Liberal thought and its revisions are in ruins below him--he looks out toward a new kind of society. But he has caught himself in his own trap: because the general can never accurately describe a particular, he can construct no clear vision of what should come about. The rudiments of his new theory, as formulated, is open to pretty much the same attacks he levels at Marxism. In attempting "total" criticism, Unger launched an attack not merely upon liberalism, but upon the concept of theory itself. And it is probably safe to say that he will spend the next 20 years trying to do what seems impossible: designing a new social theory that is not theory in any traditional logical sense.

AS A START on this project, Unger devotes the last chapter of Knowledge and Politics to a "theory of organic groups." He sketches a society of small, democratically-run communes. They are close-knit enough so that everyone knows the other members and has a form of "political love" for them, relating to them not in their work roles but as individuals. The inhabitants have lost all sense of pure self-interest and think only of the interests of the commune.

Each group might be defined by the occupations of its members, part of hierarchically-arranged system of communes. The task of the top commune would to insure peace and order throughout the system. Unger envisions in this system a harmony of the structure and the consciousness of its citizens.

But Unger fails to explore the characteristics of human nature or even whether it is innate. He has picked out elements of human activity like love and work and set out to make their refinement the good of society. But what if the will to dominate, an element present in society long before liberalism, persists? Here we meet the limits of knowledge against politics: the formation of a perfect world, like all man's "great endeavors on this earth, are condemned to incompleteness."

And if philosophy is limited by politics on one side, it is met on the other by metaphysical and religious issues. Is God separate from the world and above it, or is he present in every part of it? Religion's end, like that of politics, must be unity of the universal and the particular, through the adoption of entirely new kinds of theology. But Unger can offer no further insight into religion, because God, if he exists, has not revealed himself. The book ends eerily: "But our days pass and still we do not know you fully. Why then do you remain silent? Speak, God."