抄録
Roberto Unger who has proposed and explored the institutionalist approach of Critical Legal Studies
understands（a） law as “the institutional form of the life of a people” that embraces the internal dialectic
of its own destabilization as well as the mechanisms of stabilization; and（b） legal thought as institutional
imagination that is capable of seizing upon and developing the dialectic of destabilization in
the service of reconstruction of the basic legal-institutional arrangements of society. Since the middle
of the twentieth century, however, a variety of rationalizing and necessitarian tendencies of legal and
social thought have stood out. They have worked as blinkers that prevent legal analysts from grasping
the transformative opportunities in law expressed as institutional indeterminacy or legal pluralism in
each domain of social life, and as result, have discouraged the full development of their legal-institutional
imagination. Thus, Roberto Unger’s institutionalist critical legal studies has assumed the following
intellectual tasks:（1） kenosis -- clearing out those misdirected, rationalizing or necessitarian theories
of law and society;（2） mapping -- describing the complex institutional microstructures of society
filled with the variations and contradictions; and （3） criticism -- developing the ideas of alternative institutional
arrangements made from those variations and contradictions. Hence, Roberto Unger’s intellectual
project on law is best understood as the reinstatement of legal analysis as social theory of
the structure with the spirit of transformative vocation. It pushes one step further the progressive program
of Law and Society Movement, holding a motto that the progressive’s task is not only to perceive
in law and legal thought the characteristic reflection of the existing social structures but also to grasp
in them the promising embryos of alternative social visions for the better future.
https://ror.org/02pc6pc55 
