him to a series of imprisonments and exiles in Europe and the United States. After returning to Brazil in 1945, he co-founded a center-left party. He was elected as a representative in the Câmara Federal in 1946, governor of Bahia in 1947, and Senator in 1958. Both of Unger's parents were intellectuals. His German-born father, Artur Unger, from Dresden, arrived in the United States as a child and later became a U.S. citizen. His mother, Edyla Mangabeira, was a Brazilian poet and journalist. Artur and Edyla met in the US during the exile of Octávio Mangabeira. Early life Roberto Mangabeira Unger was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1947, and spent his childhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side. He attended the private Allen-Stevenson School. When he was eleven, his father died and his mother moved the family back to Brazil. He attended a Jesuit school and went on to law school at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Unger was admitted to Harvard Law School in September 1969. After receiving his LLM, Unger stayed at Harvard another year on a fellowship, and then entered the doctoral program. At 23 years old, Unger began teaching jurisprudence, among other things, to first year students. In 1976, aged 29, he got SJD and became one of the youngest faculty members to receive tenure from the Harvard Law School. Academic career The beginning of Unger's academic career began with the books Knowledge and Politics and Law in Modern Society, published in 1975 and 1976 respectively. These works led to the co-founding of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) with Duncan Kennedy and Morton Horwitz. The movement stirred up controversy in legal schools across America as it challenged standard legal scholarship and made radical proposals for legal education. By the early 1980s, the CLS movement touched off a heated internal debate at Harvard, pitting the CLS scholars against the older, more traditional scholars. Throughout much of the 1980s, Unger worked on his magnum opus, Politics: A Work In Constructive Social Theory, a three volume work that assessed classical social theory and developed a political, social, and economic alternative. The series is based on the premise of society as an artifact, and rejects the necessity of certain institutional arrangements. Published in 1987, Politics was foremost a critique of contemporary social theory and politics; it developed a theory of structural and ideological change, and gave an alternative account