ABSTRACT
The conclusion provides a series of the criticisms that can be directed at the FSRP while, at the same time, attempting to argue that while some of these criticisms are justified and legitimate, there is still a case that can be made that, of all the very rich constellation of post-Fordist ideas and research that developed through the 1980s and into the twenty-first century, the FSRP in all its diversity was one of the most serious in its – political, economic, and social – theoretical, empirical, and normative focus; moreover, it continues today in Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s research and writing on the experimental ‘knowledge economy’ (as confined at the moment to insular vanguards) – taking into consideration not only economic transformations in the narrow sense but, also, institutional, social, political, moral, spiritual, and religious questions. One of the most forceful criticisms of the FSRP, however, is that it failed to think through adequately its implicit and explicit criticisms of the various forms of Marxist political economy or, rather, the critique of political economy. This led to an impasse, for while the FSRP emphasised the non-necessitarian, non-deterministic, and non-essentialist (non-reductionist) character of socio-economic transformation – emphasising, in turn, the contingency and plasticity of social forms it failed, at the same time, to acknowledge the mediated totalising character of contemporary monopoly-finance capital in its overdetermined ‘poly-crisis’ and in its global reach which, to use Max Weber’s famous term, remains today the ‘most fateful force’ in our contemporary social cosmos.
