REVIEW ESSAY

Zygmunt Bauman: Liquid Modernity and

Beyond
Nicholas Gane
Department of Sociology, City University, London, UK
Zygmunt Bauman: Liquid Modernity (Cam-
bridge: Polity, 2000).
Zygmunt Bauman: The Individualized Society
(Cambridge: Polity, 2001).
Peter Beilharz (ed.): The Bauman Reader (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001).
During the late 1980s and early 1990s,
Zygmunt Bauman was one of the few social
theorists (at least with any success) to fuse
analysis of the postmodern condition with an
attempt to develop a postmodern sociology in its
own right. This project culminated in the
publication of Legislators and Interpreters
(1987) and Intimations of Postmodernity
(1992), works that have since become classics
in their eld. In recent years, however, Bauman
has turned away from postmodernism to
forward a theory of a second, liquid modernity.
The main aim of the present essay is to outline
and assess this apparent shift in position, and to
question, albeit briey, Baumans response to
the liquefaction of contemporary society.
1. Reading Bauman
The Bauman Reader, as one would expect,
contains extracts from a number of Baumans
key works. These extracts are grouped accord-
ing to the following themes: socialism, class and
power, hermeneutics and critical theory, post-
modernism, modernity, the Holocaust, ambiva-
lence and order, and globalization and poverty.
For those who approach Baumans work for the
rst time, there is plenty to get to grips with
here, especially the challenging sections repro-
duced from Legislators and Interpreters (Bauman
1987; Beilharz 2001:103124), Modernity and
the Holocaust (Bauman 1989; Beilharz: 230
259) and Modernity and Ambivalence (Bauman
1991a; Beilharz 2001:281297). For those
who are familiar with these texts meanwhile,
there are sections from his lesser-known early
writings to turn back to. Of these, the extracts
from Socialism: The Active Utopia (1976a) and
Memories of Class (1982) are the most striking,
for they show Baumans early interest in the
cultural aspects of social phenomena (long
before postmodernism became fashionable),
and with this perhaps signpost the direction of
his later work. The rst of these pieces, The
Historical Location of Socialism (Beilharz
2001:3039), treats modernity as a social
rather than technological phenomenon, as
above all, a modern network of human
relations (2001:30). Following Reinhard
Bendix, Bauman sees this network as being
shaped by two main trends: the rise of
impersonalism (with the accompanying
decline of paternalistic relations) and the advent
of plebiscitarianism (the inclusion of the
masses into politics as citizens of the state).
The former of these processes leads, Bauman
argues, to a topping of the traditional life-
world with new impersonal structures. These
structures sit on top of, rather than simply
replace, old particularized, social forms, so that
A very large part of the life-world still remains
heavily particularized, densely packed with
face-to-face, multifaceted relations and appar-
ently open to meaning-negotiating initiatives; it
is still free in the latter sense, its freedom
having been given a new, deeper dimension and
been made particularly conspicuous by contrast
with the new domain of the thoroughly
standardized pregured relations. The free-
dom which prevails in this part of the life-
world should only be understood in these
ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 2001
comparative terms (Beilharz 2001:32). This
freedom, however, is also to be read in
connection to the plebiscitarianism of modern
politics, which draws its sovereignty and legiti-
macy from the collective will of the masses, and
which assures (in principle, if rarely in practice)
the formal equality of citizens before the law.
This equality is quantitative rather than quali-
tative in nature, meaning that citizens are
equal in so far as they are indistinguishable;
whatever makes them different from each other
is simply left outside the realm of politics and the
interests of the body politic (Beilharz 2001:33).
Baumans argument is that it is precisely this
form of equality, based on the assumption that
non-political inequalities do not affect the role of
the citizen, that socialism takes issue with. It
rejects outright the belief that a citizen can have
equal political rights while remaining unequal
outside of politics, and, in view of this, pledges to
extend equality beyond politics to other life
spheres. And on the basis of this, Bauman
denes socialism as a counter-culture, for it
rejects but also continues liberal-capitalist
culture by drawing a conclusion that was
refused initially by liberal ideology: that what
had been done in politics could and should be
repeated in the other spheres of human
deprivation (Beilharz 2001:35).
This emphasis on culture also lies at the
centre of Baumans early position on class. His
argument (Bauman 1982; Beilharz 2001:68
103) is that class can no longer be understood
in terms of a struggle for control over the
production and management of surplus value,
for late industrial societies are held together by
systematic rather than social dependencies.
This means, in short, that The management of
surplus product (of its production as well as
allocation) is now a function of the system; no
single group, identied by a specic legal own-
ership status, or access to special sources of
authority, or by any other unique property, can
either do, or aspire to do it, alone (Beilharz
2001:98). By extension, no one group can be
seen to represent the interests of the system as a
whole, and no group pressure, or a group
legitimising this pressure, is likely to provide a
solution to the systems problems (Beilharz
2001:98). Rather, the state plays an increased
role in the production and distribution of social
surplus, and this leads, in turn, to the
emergence of new political divisions, tensions
and alliances as groups ght for recognition
and/or representation of their interests. These
interests may be cultural or political in nature,
but have tended to be translated by the state
(and, ironically, by Marxist theory) into (eco-
nomic) conicts over the division of surplus.
This economization of social conicts, how-
ever, is no longer possible, not least because
these conicts have proliferated and diversied
beyond state control. And in view of this,
Bauman asserts the need for a new concept of
social power; one that moves from an idea of a
single dominant class to a theory of competing
group interests, and centred upon practices of
consumption rather than the struggle for
management of production.
2. Liquid modernity
A number of these themes recur throughout
Baumans better-known writings of the late
1980s and early 1990s. In particular, they
resurface in his account of the shift from
modernity, which is founded upon universally
binding norms, to postmodernity, which is
characterized by pluralism of authority and
centrality of choice (see Beilharz 2001:173
188). In the nal chapter of The Bauman Reader
(a discussion between Bauman and Beilharz
dating from February/March 1999), however,
Bauman announces a new phase of work, one
concerned less with industrial modernity or
postmodernity than with the denition and
analysis of a second, liquid modernity. He
explains: I am inclined to describe our kind of
social condition as light, or liqueed mod-
ernity as distinct from heavy, and better still
hard and solid modernity of yore: ours is not
the constructed, administered and managed,
but a diffuse, all-permeating, all-penetrating,
all-saturating kind of modernity (Beilharz
2001:339). This new condition, characterized
by the ow of (electronically conducted) infor-
mation (software) rather than the embedded-
ness of heavy commodities (hardware), has been
the subject of a trilogy of recent works by
Bauman. The rst, Globalization: The Human
Consequences (1998), traces the increasing
separation of local (and national) politics from
global powers, and posits the emergence of a
new class hierarchy based upon the capacity for
global mobility (see Gane 2001). The second, In
Search of Politics (1999) examines the condition
of Unsicherheit (uncertainty, insecurity, un-
safety) that has emerged as a consequence
of globalization, and calls for a reworking of
private/public space (the agora) in a bid to
revitalize collective social and political forms.
268 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 2001 VOLUME 44
Finally, Liquid Modernity (2000), the subject of
the present review, develops the arguments of
both these works, and explores the increased
uidity of contemporary social life through
analysis of ve key issues: emancipation,
individuality, time/space, work and community.
This latter work opens with a detailed
denition of the concept of liquid modernity.
Bauman, working in the spirit of Marx, proposes
that modernity has been a process of liquefac-
tion from its outset, for in its earliest form it
cleared away or melted the solids of the ancien
re gime (tradition, customary rights, obligations,
family duties). This melting resulted initially
from the pursuit of a new order that was more
solid than that it replaced; one structured by
the rational calculation of effects (Weber), class
relations and the increasing dominance of the
economic sphere (Marx). This, however, has
now changed, for in the new (second) phase of
modernity all solids have become uids once
again, only this time with no new structures to
re-solidify them. Indeed, Bauman proposes that
the structural brakes on individual freedom
have, for the most part, been released: processes
of deregulation, liberalization and exibiliza-
tion have led to the radical disengagement of
free agents from the system, and to the
unlocking of individual choices from collective
projects and actions. Bauman reects:
Ours is . . . an individualized, privatized version of
modernity, with the burden of pattern-weaving
and the responsibility for failure falling primarily
on the individuals shoulders. It is the patterns of
dependency and interaction whose turn to be
liqueed has nowcome. They are now malleable to
an extent unexperienced by, and unimaginabl e for,
past generations; but like all uids they do not keep
their shape for long. Shaping them is easier than
keeping them in shape. Solids are cast once and for
all. Keeping uids in shape requires a lot of
attention, constant vigilance and perpetual effort
and even then the success of the effort is
anything but a foregone conclusion. (2000:78)
There are, in short, no longer traditional
patterns, codes, rules or pre-allocated reference
groups that individuals can look to as stable
orientation points in their lives and be guided by.
Rather, individuals now face an array of
conicting life-choices on their own, meaning
that they face them in increasing isolation and
with little prospect of assistance from any
collective body or system. With this, society,
for Bauman, becomes increasingly remote from
our lives, leaving us to act, for the most part, as
nomads and to pursue our chosen life politics
without external intervention.
In this respect, todays society is more uid
and freer than ever before, but there is a twist in
the tail: this freedom is tied to a new post-
Panoptical strategy of power. Power is now free
to move rather than grounded in a mutual
engagement between the supervisors and the
supervised, capital and labour, leaders and their
followers, armies at war (Bauman 2000:11). It
is no longer constrained by territory but is the
effect of mobility and speed. It is light, uid and
disengaged, and is both the cause and effect of
the new-found transience of social forms:
. . . social disintegration is as much a condition as
it is the outcome of the new technique of power,
using disengagement and the art of escape as its
major tools. For power to be free to ow, the world
must be free of fences, barriers, fortied borders
and checkpoints. Any dense and tight network of
social bonds, and particularly a territorially rooted
tight network, is an obstacle to be cleared out of
the way. Global powers are bent on dismantling
such networks for the sake of their continuous and
growing uidity, that principal source of their
strength and the warrant of their invincibilit y. And
it is the falling apart, the friability, the brittleness,
the transience, the until-further-noticenes s of
human bonds and networks which allow these
powers to do their job in the rst place. (Bauman
2000:14)
And this, for Bauman, marks the dawning of a
new dystopia, for it spells the demise of collective
forms of action and with this the disintegration
of the social more generally. Indeed, no longer
is it a viable possibility for the majority to take a
collective stand against power, for not only does
power move too quickly, but the mass itself has
been reduced to a collection of individuals who
are preoccupied with their own freedoms, and
who remain disengaged spatially from a global
elite (the new absentee landlords) who are
never weighed down by possessions and, free of
ties to any particular territory, are always on the
move.
The main body of Liquid Modernity exam-
ines the features of this new social condition in
some detail. Chapter 1 addresses the question of
emancipation. Baumans position here is novel,
for he argues that contemporary life is as free
as could possibly be imagined, for now social
institutions are only too willing to cede the
worries of denitions and identities to the
individual initiative (2000:22), but that this
freedom gives rises to a whole new set of
problems. The main one of these is that
269 Liquid Modernity and Beyond
individuals have to take responsibility for their
own self-determination without the traditional
help of any collective agency, leaving them
isolated and preoccupied with their own perso-
nal troubles (which Bauman treats as non-
additive and thus removed from a common
cause). A result of this is that public life
becomes colonized by private issues: public
interest is reduced to curiosity about the
private lives of public gures, and the art of
public life is narrowed to the public display of
private affairs and public confessions of private
sentiments (the more intimate the better)
(Bauman 2000:37). And with this process of
individualization, individuals cease to be true
citizens, for they no longer share common
public interests, and society ceases to be
autonomous, for it is no longer self-constituted
through the shared accomplishments of its
members. Baumans response to this situation
is to push for a revitalization of public/private
space (the agora) (see Bauman 1999; Gane
2000) through protection of the public sphere
from invasion from private interests. This, he
proposes, is to be the task of critical theory: Any
true liberation calls today for more, not less, of
the public sphere and public power (Bau-
man 2000:51).
The following chapters build on this theme.
In Chapter 2, Bauman takes a profoundly anti-
Weberian stance on the question of individual-
ity, arguing that the concepts of instrumental-
and value-rationality are now outdated, for in
liquid modernity the ends of actions, rather
than the means by which to achieve them, are
the cause of fundamental uncertainty. He
observes: the odds are that most of human life
and most of human lives will be spent agonizing
about the choice of goals, rather than nding
the means to the ends which do not call for
reection (Bauman 2000:61). This is so
because the range of pursuable ends has
proliferated wildly with modernization (what
Baudrillard (1990:1112) calls hypertely),
meaning that now (as Simmel (1997) envi-
saged) there are simply too many possibilities for
any one individual to explore. This, in part, is
the consequence of a shift from life organized
around production (which is normatively regu-
lated) to life organized around consumption,
which, for Bauman, is without norms insofar as
it is guided by seduction, ever rising desires and
volatile wishes (2000:76). And in this respect,
life in liquid modernity is akin to life in the
shopping mall: we are now individualized
consumers free to shop around in the
supermarket of identities (Bauman 2000:83),
constrained only by the resources at our
disposal.
Bauman returns to this question of con-
sumption in an analysis of liquid time/space in
chapter 3. Here, he divides city-space into four
main types: emic, phagic, non-places and empty
space. The rst of these is public yet non-civil
urban space which is meant to be looked at
rather than lived in, and operates by spitting
out or barring those not seen to belong there
(La Defense in Paris is cited as an example).
Phagic space is again public yet non-civil in
nature, but encourages the sharing of physical
space (such as shopping malls) with others
engaged in the same activity (consuming), and
employs a different way of coping with other-
ness: ingesting, devouring foreign bodies
and spirits so that they be made, through
metabolism, identical with, and no longer
distinguishable from, the ingesting body
(Bauman 2000:101). Finally, non-places are
those nowherevilles that discourage settlement
but nonetheless remain inhabited by strangers
(examples are airports, motorways, hotels),
while empty space refers to those areas that
have yet to be colonized by designers, and
hence remain, at least from the outside, empty
of meaning. These four types of space have
come to dominate the urban environment, yet
to some extent this development has been
overshadowed by a more important phenom-
enon: the increasing irrelevance of space itself.
For whereas in heavy (industrial) modernity
the possession of space was the key issue, now it
is the push for instant living. Bauman
explains: In the software universe of light-
speed travel, space may be traversed, literally, in
no time; the difference between far away
and down here is cancelled. Space no more
sets limits to action and its effects, and counts
little, or does not count at all. It has lost its
strategic value, the military experts would
say (2000:117).
The nal two chapters of Liquid Modernity
turn to the issues of work and community. In
the former of these, Bauman treats the emer-
gence of privatized, deregulated and exible
work patterns as paralleling the shift from
marriage to cohabitation in personal relation-
ships: Marriages till death us do part are
decidedly out of fashion and have become a
rarity. . . Flexibility is the slogan of the day,
and when applied to the labour market it augurs
an end to the job as we know it, announcing
instead the advent of work on short-term
270 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 2001 VOLUME 44
contracts, rolling contracts or no contracts,
positions with no in-built security but with the
until further notice clause (2000:147).
Finally, he examines the renewal of commu-
nity as a possible solution to this uncertain new
world. Here, he takes a erce stand against the
communitarian position, arguing that it takes a
model of ethnic community as its foundation,
and seeks to recapture the ethnic homogeneity
achieved, at least in part, by the modern nation-
state. In response, a republican model of unity
is proposed, one that emerges as a joint
achievement of the agents engaged in self-
identication pursuits, and proceeds through
negotiation and reconciliation rather than the
denial, stiing or smothering out of differences
(2000:178).
3. The individualized society
The Individualized Society restates many of the
arguments of Liquid Modernity. It comprises a
number of loosely connected essays collected
under three headings: The Way We Are, The
Way We Think and The Way We Act. The rst
of these sections repeats much of what Bauman
has said elsewhere. Chapter 1, The Rise and
Fall of Labour, reproduces word-for-word (with-
out any acknowledgement) parts of chapter 4 of
Liquid Modernity (compare Bauman 1999:140
152 with 2001:1728 and 1999:1667 with
2001:2830). Chapter 2, Local Orders, Global
Chaos, adds little to the arguments of Globaliza-
tion: The Human Consequences (1998), while
chapter 3, Freedom and Security, repeats the
position taken in Postmodernity and Its Discon-
tents (1997:116) and again cuts-and-pastes
material from Liquid Modernity (compare Bau-
man 1999:3038 with 2001:4550). There is,
however, some new material included in this
volume. Chapter 4 updates the thesis of
Modernity and Ambivalence (Bauman 1991a),
and points to the individualization of ambiva-
lence, ambiguity and equivocality with the rise
of liquid modernity: Like so many other aspects
of contemporary society, the dangers of ambiva-
lence have undergone a process of deregulation,
and the task of coping with the results . . . has
been privatised. Ambivalence may be, as before,
a social phenomenon, but each one of us faces it
alone, as a personal problem (2001:69). Bau-
man extends this argument in chapter 6, in
which he identies four factors that have
contributed to a feeling of increased uncertainty
in contemporary life. First, is the newfound
inability of traditional (state-centred) institu-
tions to bring (or even promise to bring) order
and stability to global affairs (see Bauman
1998a, 2001:3140). Second, is universal
deregulation: the unqualied priority awarded
to the irrationality and moral blindness of
market competition, the unbound freedom
granted to capital and nance at the expense
of all other freedoms, the tearing up of societally
maintained safety nets, and the neglect of all but
economic considerations . . . (2001:84).
Third, is the changing nature of interpersonal
relations, which, permeated by the spirit of
consumerism, have become increasingly mar-
ket-dependent, so much so that now they even
reect the capriciousness and unpredictability
of the market (2001:86). Finally, traditionally
stable social forms have, for Bauman, become
indeterminate and soft, including individual
identities, which are no longer given but
constructed, and are split into collections of
snapshots rather than lived in determinate (or
determined) singularity.
The second part of this work, The Way We
Think, again reproduces large chunks of Liquid
Modernity, this time on the issues of critique and
progress (compare Bauman 2001:99108
with 2000:2241, and 2001:109113 with
2000:130137). This section, however, also
contains an interesting essay on the question of
poverty. In this, Bauman cites statistics that
suggest the emergence of a new global polariza-
tion (the same gures are used in In Search of
Politics, see Bauman (1999:176177). For
example: the three richest men on the globe
have private assets bigger than the combined
national product of the forty-eight poorest
countries; the fortune of the fteen richest
persons exceeds the total product of the whole
of sub-Saharan Africa (2001:115). Baumans
argument, though, is novel: that the new poor
play a specic role in the maintenance of a kind
of global order. The poor, paradoxically, are
those that experience life with some degree of
certainty, in the shape of disease-crime-and-
drug-infested mean streets (2001:116), and
thereby act as a reminder to the rest of society of
the fundamental Unsicherheit (insecurity, uncer-
tainty, unsafety) of life itself: of what happens if
things go wrong. The poor, seen in this way,
cause the rest of society to live in fear, to keep at
bay and in step, and to fear certainty more than
uncertainty. There can, for Bauman, be only
one solution to this situation: human society
cannot be liberated from its ambient fear and
impotence unless its poorest part is liberated
271 Liquid Modernity and Beyond
from its penury (2001:116). Quite how this is
to be achieved, however, remains less than clear.
The nal section of this book, The Way We
Act, centres on the nature of contemporary
ethics and morality. Particularly challenging are
the essays addressing the connection of love and
reason (chapter 13) and the privatization of
morality (chapter 14). In the former of these,
Bauman draws a distinction between love,
which is about value, and reason, which is
about use. Love, dened in this way, is innite in
its horizon, while the intention of reason, by
contrast is not to open the gate into innity, but
to shut it down, and securely. The act of use is
an event in time, and an event which fulls and
exhausts itself in a limited time (2001:166).
Moreover, whereas reason, for Bauman,
prompts loyalty to the self, love, by contrast,
demands solidarity with the other. Despite these
differences, however, love and reason remain
closely tied. Love (like morality) needs reason as
an escape from its own state of uncertainty, as
an authority that can tell us with some degree of
self-condence how to go on. It needs reason,
in short, as a hide-out from the unspokenness
of ethical demand and the unconditionality of
moral responsibility (Bauman 2001:174). This
tendency, however, is deeply problematic, for
not only does it present the refusal to share as a
moral act, but, more importantly, offers an
escape from morality rather than the means to
cope and deal with its genuine dilemmas
(Bauman 2001:174). No obvious solution is
offered to this problem, but Bauman does tackle
the question of responsibility further in the
course of a dense reection on the privatization
of moral life. His position here is forged against
the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Hans Jonas.
Levinas, he argues, while offering rich inspira-
tion for the analysis of the endemic aporia of
moral responsibility, neglects the complex
social/political processes which mediate
between individual moral impulses and the
overall ethical effects of political actions
(2001:183). Jonas, by contrast, places morality
as an event in time and calls for a categorical
imperative mark two, but in so doing fails to see
that the interests of ethics and Reason may not
always coincide (see above). In response to both
these positions, Bauman forwards an alterna-
tive perspective: that ethics are under siege, for
the emergence of new global dangers has been
accompanied by a growing impotence to
prevent them or alleviate the gravity of their
impact (2001:186). This impotence has
resulted, above all, from the deregulation of
market forces, which, he claims, are now
exempt from effective political control, and
from the new social polarization that has
emerged with globalization (see Bauman
1998). With these processes, traditional social
responsibilities have been privatized or indivi-
dualized (shifted from state institutions to the
individual), with the result that collective action
has become increasingly difcult. And as for
intellectuals saving us from this situation,
Bauman thinks this unlikely: what marks off
the present-day thought of knowledge classes is
its self-referentiality, its acute preoccupation
with the conditions of its own professional
activity and an increasingly non-committal
stance taken towards other sectors of society
(2001:198).
4. Critical remarks
Baumans work, even if one doesnt always
agree with its conclusions, is a joy to read: it is
inventive, provocative, unpretentious and, most
importantly, packed full of new, challenging
ideas. For these reasons alone I would recom-
mend the three books under review here. This
said, however, each of these publications has its
weaknesses. First, The Bauman Reader: As with
all readers, this work hangs or falls on the
selection of material on offer and the way in
which this material is organized and edited, and
in each of these respects there are difculties.
First, as Beilharz notes at the outset (2001:vii
viii), a number of Baumans works have been
excluded from this volume; in particular:
Between Class and Elite (1972), Culture as Praxis
(1973), Towards a Critical Sociology (1976b),
Freedom (1988), Mortality, Immortality and
Other Life-Strategies (1991b) and Postmodern
Ethics (1993). Of course, one has to draw the
line somewhere, and little more could be
included in a volume that already stretches to
365 pages. This said, what is at issue is not the
length of this work but the editors criteria for
prioritizing certain texts over others. Beilharzs
justication is as follows: I have endeavoured
both to include selections which are indicative
of the breadth and width of Baumans thinking,
while at the same time choosing especially those
whose prose form best carries these arguments
(2001:vii). This emphasis on breadth and width
coupled with clarity of argument succeeds in
producing a wide-ranging and accessible intro-
duction to the authors work, but does so by
neglecting a number of his more challenging
272 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 2001 VOLUME 44
ideas. A key point in case is the exclusion of
Postmodern Ethics (1993), which, in its attempt
to formulate a new non-universalizable and
aporetic morality, is one of Baumans most
difcult but important texts. The arguments of
Life in Fragments (1995), Baumans other main
work on ethical life, are also neglected. A short
section from this work, A Century of Camps
(Beilharz 2001:266280) is reproduced, but, as
its title suggests, this piece focuses on the
Holocaust and the violence of totalitarianism
rather than the issue of postmodern morality.
The result is that morality and ethics are
excluded as a theme from this reader. And
this, I believe, is a mistake, especially given
Baumans own declaration that ethics rather
than aesthetics are the central aspect of post-
modernity (see Beilharz 2001:21).
The second main problem with the Reader
is that it lacks editorial precision. The long
section on Critical Theory (2001:138163),
taken from Etzkowitz and Glassmans The
Renascence of Sociological Theory (1991) is
particularly poor, as there is no referencing
and no bibliography, with the consequence that,
on page 150, Bauman quotes from a work
without us knowing either its title or the
identity of its author (this, admittedly, is an
annoying, if occasional, feature of Baumans
writings, but one that an editor should seek to
overcome). Elsewhere, important footnotes are
removed from original works, without acknowl-
edgement (see, for example, Beilharz 2001:283;
compare with Bauman 1991a:34). And, more
seriously, sections of texts are reproduced with-
out the reader being told whether they have
been taken in their entirety or, if not, where they
have been abridged. In places, standard nota-
tion (. . .) is used to indicate a cut in the text (see
Beilharz 2001:111), but this is not always the
case. The rst short section reproduced from
Modernity and Ambivalence (see Beilharz
2001:281288), for example, is only part of
the introduction to the original work (see
Bauman 1991a:19), but nowhere is this said
to be the case. The extract is simply cut to a
rather abrupt and inconclusive end, prompting
one to check against the original and then read
the nal seven pages of the chapter, an action
that would seem to defeat the very point of a
reader. This problem, I suggest, could readily be
resolved either through the inclusion of key
extracts (of which this is one) in their entirety,
or, where this is not possible, through a clearer
indication of why each section has been chosen,
where it has been taken from (including page
references) and whether it has been reproduced
in part or in full.
Regarding Liquid Modernity and The Indivi-
dualized Society, the substance rather than the
form of Baumans argument is problematic. For,
on one hand, these works propose that all aspects
of modern life (for example, personal relation-
ships, working patterns, time/space, commu-
nity) have become increasingly uid (transient,
uncertain and changeable). While on the other,
they present the case for the emergence of a new
social hierarchy, one that reects an increasingly
rigid class polarization. These two halves of
Baumans position appear to lie in fundamental
conict. For Bauman, the new polarization is
based upon a capacity for movement, so that the
contemporary global elites are those absentee
landlords who can travel light and at will, while
the masses have little choice other than to
remain tied to their locality. This is all very
well, but in essence this means nothing much
has changed. The boundaries between the
extraterritorial elites and the masses are still as
solid as ever, the only real difference being that
Bauman has replaced capital with mobility as
the yardstick for measuring class. And this
move leads, in practice, to just the economiza-
tion of social differences that his early work
protests against (see above), as those with capital
(albeit light, extraterritorial capital) tend also
to have the ability to move. This economization
may be observed in all of Baumans recent works.
In Globalization: The Human Consequences, for
example, he informs us that the total wealth of
the top 358 global billionaires equals the
combined incomes of 2.3 billion of the poorest
people (45 per cent of the worlds population)
(1998:70). In In Search of Politics, he states:
Among 4.5 billion of the residents of the devel-
oping countries, three in every ve are deprived
access to basic infrastructures: a third has no
access to drinkable water, a quarter has no
accommodation worthy of the name, one-fth
has no use of sanitary and medical services . . . In
7080 of the 100 or so developing countries the
average income per head of population is today
lower than ten or even thirty years ago; 120
million people live on less than one dollar a day.
(1999:175176)
And just to drive the point home, he reminds us,
in The Individualized Society, that At the same
time, in the USA, by far the richest country in
the world and the homeland of the worlds
wealthiest people, 16.5 per cent of the popula-
tion live in poverty; one-fth of adult men and
women can neither read nor write, while 13 per
273 Liquid Modernity and Beyond
cent have a life expectancy shorter than sixty
years (2001:115). What these extracts show is
that behind the new rhetoric of uidity and
movement, fairly crude economic differences
are, for Bauman, the dening criteria of the new
global class hierarchy (see Gane 2001). And this
clearly makes his position on the new moder-
nity difcult to sustain, for given that these
material differences are just as hard and fast as
ever, there is little evidence to suggest that the
structural (solid) inequalities of industrial
modernity have, in fact, been liqueed.
Parts of Baumans second main thesis
that we are witnessing the individualization of
society are also questionable. Bauman is right
to argue that the public sphere is being
colonized by private concerns, and that indivi-
duals have to take increased responsibility for
their successes and failures. At the same time,
however, he tends to downplay the more
positive aspects of the uidity of contemporary
life. This is particularly the case regarding the
question of identity. He argues: What the idea of
individualization carries is the emancipation
of the individual from the ascribed, inherited
and inborn determination of his or her social
character (Bauman 2001:144). To many, this
has come as a welcome development, for it has
marked a new freedom from many of the
constraints of the rst modernity, and has
been accompanied by the birth of a new life-
politics. For Bauman, however, this opening
has simply become another burden: it marks the
transformation of identity from a given to a
task, and the replacement of the heterono-
mous determination of social standing with a
compulsive and obligatory self-determination
(2001:145). This rather negative outlook
clouds his account of the emergence of new
liquid social forms. For example: does the new
transience and uidity of social life really mean
that we have to face the world as isolated
individuals? Or have new forms of sociality
emerged that are more dynamic and exciting
than before? Indeed, what holds an individu-
alized, self-determined society together? In
what ways have key institutions (like the family)
changed, and what exactly do we mean now by
the social? These questions are addressed only
supercially in Liquid Modernity and The Indivi-
dualized Society. And while Bauman remains
staunchly critical of the inability of contempor-
ary institutions to translate private (personal)
concerns into collective (public) issues, this
situation, as feminist theory has shown, is
nothing exactly new.
In this latter respect, Baumans response to
the liquefaction and individualization of
modernity is also disappointing. This response
takes the form of an appeal for the regeneration
of public/private space (the agora), so that
private troubles can once again be translated
into public issues, and the public sphere (the
ecclesia) be protected from invasion by individual
interests (see Bauman 2001:202). This aim is
admirable, but Bauman gives little indication of
how it is to be achieved in practice. The closest he
comes is in In Search of Politics, in which he
asserts that individual liberty can be only a
product of collective work (1999:7), and, on
this basis, proposes that the rebuilding of the
agora is to proceed through dismantling the
limits to citizens freedom (to protect against
totalitarianism) and through self-limitation on
the part of citizens (to protect against indivi-
dualization) (1999:4). Bauman does little in
either Liquid Modernity or The Individualized
Society to build on this abstract proposal,
although the emphasis of his position changes
slightly. Now, there is no argument to be found
for individual self-limitation (which was never
particularly convincing in the rst place), but
rather a demand for greater public power: The
war of emancipation is not over. But to progress
any further, it must now resuscitate what for
most of its history it did its best to destroy and
push out of its way. Any true liberation calls today
for more, not less, of the public sphere and public
power. It is now the public sphere which badly
needs defence against the invading private
though, paradoxically, in order to enhance, not
cut down, individual liberty (2000:51). What
this public sphere and public power, capable
of transforming individuals into citizens, is to
look like, however, we are never told. This is
perhaps because Bauman remains in interpre-
tative rather than legislative mode. But even
this argument is difcult to sustain for in his
conversation with Peter Beilharz at the conclu-
sion of The Bauman Reader, he argues that it is
the very purpose of sociology to disclose values
and choices that help humanity in life:
Wertfreiheit is as human silences are con-
cerned not just a pipe-dream, but also an
utterly inhuman delusion . . . (Beilharz 2001:
335). Given this stance, not only is any
distinction between legislation and interpreta-
tion difcult, if not impossible, to uphold (since
every act of interpretation always contains a
legislative moment), but also we may expect
more from Bauman in the way of alternatives to,
or remedies for, liquid modernity. Indeed, it is
274 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 2001 VOLUME 44
here that his argument breaks down, for it is
one thing to propose the reinvigoration of
collective (public) life through the rebuilding of
the agora, but another to apply this ancient ideal
to life today, and to specify exactly how the
public sphere may proceed to regain its past
autonomy.
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