In this work, 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.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. 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 Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two
previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and 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.
