False necessity uses structural analysis to understand sociopolitical arrangements, but discards the tendency to assemble indivisible categories and to create law-like explanations.
[3] Liberal political theorists of the seventeenth century, such as Hobbes and Locke, saw the issue as one of sacrificing some individual freedoms in order to gain others.
These early Enlightenment thinkers opposed existing religious, aristocratic, and absolutist institutions and organizations as the natural state of the world.
His main book on the thesis, False Necessity: Anti-necessitarian social theory in the service of radical democracy, was first published in 1987 by Cambridge University Press, and reissued in 2004 by Verso with a new 124 page introduction, and a new appendix, "Five theses on the relation of religion to politics, illustrated by allusions to Brazilian experience.
The theory rejects the constraints and focuses on how human behavior is shaped by the deep structures of these institutions, and how they can be remade at will, either in whole or in part.
[5] The problem of false necessity arises due to the failure of transformative practice to realize its stated aim.
This can take form in three different scenarios:[6] Unger points to mass politics as a means to counter oligarchy and group identity.
[7] That transformative action, Unger believes, does not have to be a complete overhaul or total revolution, but rather is "a piecemeal but cumulative change in the organization of society".
[14][15] Richard Rorty compared the theory's move toward greater liberalism with Jürgen Habermas, and called it a powerful alternative to the postmodern "School of Resentment".
[17] Bernard Yack wrote that it contributed to "a new left Kantian approach to the problem of realizing human freedom in our social institutions".