Cover of Liquid Modernity

Liquid Modernity

Liquid Series seriesNext:Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds(2003) →

In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history.

Read more

This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning.

Liquid Modernityconcludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequencesand In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 228 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Liquid Modernity? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Liquid Modernity. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge Shares sociology, philosophy, nonfiction
  2. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action Shares sociology, philosophy, nonfiction
  3. The Consequences of Modernity Shares sociology, nonfiction, modernity
  4. On Individuality and Social Forms Shares sociology, philosophy, nonfiction

“People who read Liquid Modernity tend to reach for these next.”

  1. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society
  2. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society
  3. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979
  4. Social Systems

“If you want more of the same (sociology about social issues), start with these.”

  1. The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change
  2. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age
  3. Sociology and Philosophy
  4. Community and Civil Society

“If it was the philosophy that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Emile Durkheim: Selected Writings
  2. Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society
  3. The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life
  4. The Fall of Public Man

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today
  2. Emancipation
  3. The Imaginary Institution of Society
  4. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution